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Comment by awjr | Hacker News Reader

Norway is planning to phase out petrol/diesel cars by 2025 https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry/norway-phase-out...

I suspect this is where we are headed.

However an EV car takes the same space up as an ICE car. EV cars do not solve congestion and if you move from a policy of maximising traffic flow to maximising road capacity you very quickly realise that the fundemental problem is the private car. So the conclusion is to ban the car https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/dec/09/car-free-city...

I believe Copenhagen now has only 9% of people commuting by private car and 62% by bicycle.

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I agree. So we'll just sit in the same traffic in our electric car for an hour, each way to work?

I could see traffic a being a lot better with fully autonomous cars. Still, public transportation and more bike lanes seem like a much better investment and way to go.

I'd be surprised if private autonomous cars will be allowed into cities, whereas public ride share autonomous mini-buses with dynamic routing AI will be the way forward.

Prepare to be surprised

There are already congestion charging schemes. I doubt it will ever get to a ban (and you can wouldn't want that) but I think it will be expensive. You could actually just charge a flat fee for road space, so a bus carrying 70 people is 3 times as long as a car, so only pays 3 times more. And maybe a separate charge of minimum standard to discourage nitrogen or particulate air pollution.

I suspect that the move to EV will eventually create a revenue hole from reduced fuel taxes necessitating the move to road pricing. Politically unpalatable but I think a necessary step.

I think people like their privacy too much for that, as efficient as it may be. It seems more likely to me that private (or public single-occupant) autonomous cars will become smaller. Something like a Smart car size autonomous EV -- small enough to minimize costs, large enough to be useful for the single rider.

A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transport — paraphrased from Enrique Penalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia

http://newyork.thecityatlas.org/lifestyle/developed-area-ric...

I think privacy is something that is a function of cost benefit. When road pricing becomes ubiquitous (as it will given the march towards EV), people will begin shift to public transport.

Perhaps the solution for Americans will need to be different to that of the rest of the world.

> So we'll just sit in the same traffic in our electric car for an hour, each way to work?

On the bright side, electric cars don't pollute emissions or noise when idling. It's an incremental improvement, but one I happily embrace.

Modern ICE vehicles with stop-start which is available even on mid-range vehicles don't pollute while idling, so then the problem with heavy traffic is limited to moving slowly, which electric vehicles still seem better at.

CO2 causes climate change. Buying oil empowers authoritarian, barbaric regimes.

EVs full speed ahead.

I'd be a bit scared to sit inside a public autonomous vehicle. I mean, how hard could it be to tamper with the thing before I get in? I'd be surprised if it didn't run WiFi, Bluetooth AND cellular at the same time.

It'd be best if the software on it was open source, came with a nice tasty bug bounty and had an occasional audit from a third party secu- oh god it's never happening is it

I can understand worries about some kind of remote mass hacking, but in-person tampering with one vehicle? Just slit the brake line. In other words, not a new issue.

People could also tamper with non-autonomous transit like disabling the breaks.

EV cars do not solve congestion

Autopilot cars can do a lot for congestion. If every driver implemented the "stay halfway between" algorithm mentioned in CGP Grey's "The Simple Solution to Traffic" video, there would be far less congestion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE

EVs would also enable simpler tunnel construction and better tunnel economics. This is a part of Elon Musk's new proposals.

The car that drives you 60 miles between cities should look different to the car that drives you 2 miles across a city and while EV's are a great start to cleaning city air I believe it will be autonomous features that will change city congestion. The form factor possibilities will allow for far higher traffic density through reduced size, less car ownership and correspondingly less humans using cars as a performance indicator.

As someone already pointed out, I think advances in auto-pilot will help a lot with congestion as vehicles begin communicating with other nearby vehicles and traffic lights.

One thing you don't hear discussed much though is the reduction of noise that I assume will become quite noticeable once most vehicles are electric. Living close to a busy road or highway should become a lot more bearable.

I personally do not think auto-pilot will help with congestion at all unless they are used as carpool vehicles to pick up and drop off people on route. Once you have auto-pilot, you have another group of the population that don't drive now that will start using auto pilots. I'm mostly referring to old people who don't drive but there are many others who don't drive due to limitations.

Or simply people who don't like driving in traffic, its boring and annoying but you still have to pay attention and can't do much else except listen to a podcast or music. If the car drove itself you could work just as you can in a train or as a passenger. This would make a 1h commute much more tolerable. I can see many more people who don't want to drive deciding to use private autonomous vehicles over crowded/dirty public transit.

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