Hacker News Reader

Comment by saosebastiao | Hacker News Reader

I'm confident in many benefits of autonomous vehicles, but reducing congestion is not one of them. Quite the opposite, actually.

Wanna know what happens when you no longer have people looking for parking but rather have them picking up and dropping off at the curb? Visit a busy airport or pickup/dropoff curbs at a large suburban elementary school.

Now throw in the fact that in order to get to your destination, you'll have to drive through those clusterfucks that are caused by other people's destinations. Oh, and all the cars that might not be circling looking for parking, but are now circling looking for new passengers. Oh, and all the new cars on the road when lower costs move people from transit into SOVs. That's the future, embrace it.

View on HN

Sure, if we accept the idea that traffic congestion increases, but I don't think that it will be the biggest problem because with current forms of congestion it becomes frustrating because you have to pay attention to the road and operate the car, while alternatively with a SDC, that'll no longer be the case and can actively engage in productive activities (or not).

I suppose there are other arguments to this; Maybe time critical events such as emergency vehicles attempting to reach a destination, but there's probably a solution to this...

It's like introducing a new more efficient protocol over existing limited networks. It can reduce congestion sure by using the network more efficiently, but only if done cold turkey (no or limited human drivers). This is unlikely to happen in ge states, but much more likely to happen in Asia (China) where they have real traffic problems with hard limits on infrastructure.

> but reducing congestion is not one of them. Quite the opposite, actually.

The premise of that is to increase vehicle usage efficiency, hence reduce the total amount of vehicles on road and reduce congestion.

Additional autonomous vehicles applied in public transits will further improve traffic flow (on demand vs. fixed scheduled services, reducing empty runs etc.)

Yet every time we increase efficiency by building roads we end up with more congestion. Can we outrun this problem?

Replace parking with more loading zones - of course that requires city governments to understand and embrace the shift.

Some drivers need a space fit for a semi truck in order to pull out into traffic.

Some drivers don't go at green lights because they're distracted.

Some drivers camp in the left lane.

It's highly possible that the cumulative benefit of widespread adoption of self driving cars could offset the negative aspects of people who suck at some subset of driving.

Perhaps cars will be smaller? If people choose to take the cheapest available self-driving taxi, which happens to be the smallest car that will fit their need, cars may end up smaller and less space will be taken up by vehicles on the roads and in such loading zones.

It's an interesting problem for the prestige car manufacturers, people don't care what the make of a taxi is in the same way they do about the car parked on their drive.

There will be more efficient algorithms developed over time, all it will take is a software update - behavior will change overnight (for better or worse).

When there are a lot fewer cars, congestion will go down. Cars will be shared. Sort of a Uber without drivers. Why own your own car?

>Why own your own car?

Where else are we going to live?

Will there be a lot fewer cars, though? Assuming you want to achieve the same throughput, you'd still need about as many cars as there are at rush hour today.

To get less congestion you would need fewer journeys, as this technology is likely to make travel cheaper I think we can expect the opposite.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com