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Comment by joshuaheard | Hacker News Reader

Modern urban planners can take a lesson from this. People abandoned light rail in Los Angeles because they preferred their cars. A car provides anytime, anywhere, personal door-to-door transportation versus the fixed-time, fixed-place, mass transit system that only takes you part way like fixed rail. Light rail will die a similar death in U.S. cities, especially when self-driving cars decrease traffic by a significant amount in the near future.

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That's only true if your origin and destination are both surrounded by parking which makes them places not worth visiting. The thing about trams is they enable a full urban environment of places people actually want to be.

> especially when self-driving cars decrease traffic by a significant amount in the near future.

This is a fallacy - self-driving cars may reduce car ownership and may reduce traffic fatalities, but they could only reduce traffic if speeds were extraordinarily high.

That _might_ happen, but it'd also make every street a freeway. It's unlivable, and I will fight against that world.

>This is a fallacy - self-driving cars may reduce car ownership and may reduce traffic fatalities, but they could only reduce traffic if speeds were extraordinarily high.

That's not true at all. A ton of traffic congestion is caused by people making suboptimal decisions in traffic. Blocking intersections, not merging properly, stooping and going instead of coasting at a set speed, etc. really reduce the speed of traffic.

If you created a self driving only traffic system that guided the cars in an optimal path and speed you could increase traffic throughput by a lot.

But the current generation of self driving cars aren't even close to that task. If anything they will clog traffic even more when they panic and stop in the middle of traffic. That prevents accidents but it also will clog streets during rush hour.

But eventually they may solve traffic jams.

Not sure why are are getting down voted as you are correct that people making sub-optimal decisions while driving in traffic. I remember watching a video of people driving in a circle and how bad mistakes trickle back to the end of the traffic.

Please see today's article on HackerNews front page: http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160428-how-ai-will-solve-tr...

I just got a wicked case of the heebie-jeebies thinking about the automotive equivalent of CSMA/CD.

Don't worry too much about it - unless you ban all existing cars, we're stuck with the mixed traffic for the foreseeable future. Once you're 100% robotic, you could just use smaller cars to get more effective lanes instead of increasing speeds.

Not that you could increase speeds safely - SDCs still need to brake in time, and they're bound by the same laws of physics, and there are still blind corners in the future.

Indeed. I think the future of self driving cars will be as a last-mile service for public transport. This will likely improve ridership, both due to the convenience of door-to-door transport, and also by allowing stations to serve much larger areas effectively. It also means the cars themselves can be much more efficient, as they only need to travel short distances, and usually only need to carry one person.

Cars don't scale. People get around in high density cities without cars just fine. It saves money and it's better for the environment, too.

And, yet, most high density cities also have a huge amount of automobile traffic in addition to whatever public transportation they have. (Although, depending upon the city, a significant portion of that auto traffic is cabs--in part because of the expense/difficulty of parking.)

I am not sure self-driving cars will reduce traffic. My expectation is that they will increase traffic. By a lot probably. And commutes will get even longer.

You're assuming car ownership will remain in place as it is now. If vehicles are shared instead of fully owned, you can be more efficient. Think of how many trips are simply transporting a car. For example, let's say I need to pick up a friend from the airport. I would waste a one-way trip going to the airport. I didn't need to go to the airport. The only reason it was necessary for me to go is that I needed to get a car to my friend.

If my fried could have just summoned the nearest self driving car, an entire one way trip wouldn't ever occurred.

However, there is a flaw in that system, in that most people tend to be on the road at the same time (rush hours).

If it becomes popular to share cars then this may work. Looking at reality I have my doubts though. If people wanted to share cars you would see neighbors sharing cars for example. In the US many families or friends not even share cars. When I go out with people it ends up with seven people going in 4 cars or similar.

A self driving car takes the pain out of driving so unless society changes a lot we will see more cars driving around (often empty) and people will have longer commutes while sleeping their car.

Sharing a vehicle is not fun when the other driver could: 1. wreck it, 2. not return it promptly, 3. trash it. A self-driving car solves problem 1, partially solves 2, and does nothing for 3.

I guess a self driving shared car needs also to be self cleaning. that may work.

Put together a amalgam self-driving Sanisette [1] and you implement an even more ridiculous aspect of Idiocracy than its La-Z-Boy with a built-in toilet [2]. And while I make a joke about it now, someones in the future are going to convince a line of VCs to incrementally enable people eventually gaming/Facebooking in VR while hurtling down the freeway doing Number Two, and get handsome exits on each step towards that, and it will all be counted as a net economic benefit in the end. I'm either kidding, or will have checked out well before that ever becomes mainstream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanisette

[2] http://www.eatmedaily.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/...

I think that self driving cars will help with parking, but not with traffic. You won't have to park your car in the city, where space is at a premium, the car will go park itself at another location, or pick up another passenger.

I think self-driving cars will reduce congestion in two ways. On freeways, due to slow human reaction times, there is a 2 car-length space between cars, meaning cars only take up about a third of the space on the freeway. With self-driving cars, there is near instant reaction time, so the space between cars will be 2 feet. With that, you basically triple the amount of cars on the freeway, reducing congestion by two-thirds.

In addition to this, on surface streets, traffic lights meter traffic through intersections. With self-driving cars, the cars will be able to go through intersections without the need for a traffic light, eliminating that metering effect.

Highly unlikely. We'll probably be able to get twice the usage out of existing roads because the distance between cars will shrink dramatically.

In my cynical opinion SDCs will likely precipitate a ten year pause in new road construction as drive times drop dramatically. But at some point we'll catch up to the additional capacity and spend another five or six years suffering as roads are built and expanded.

But the newly constructed roads will be more efficiently utilized than roads at present, so it will be cheaper per passenger mile.

lol I'm sure places like Japan and New York City regret their horrible investments in rail every day

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