Why not increase the gas tax and subsidize electric vehicles and charging stations?
This will help EV’s get to the point where they’re cheaper.
This will help EV’s get to the point where they’re cheaper.
And then there's the people that see self-driving cars as the way out of the congestion. But self-driving cars will make congestion worse, by making single occupancy vehicle trips cheaper and easier, shifting more people from transit to cars. But then each self-driving car doubles the number of trips, since instead of someone driving to work and parking, a self-driving car will drop them off at work then drive off to look for another passenger or parking outside of downtown, so 2 trips for one passenger.
Cars ("vehicles") are part of our larger economic system, and that system does little to limit commutes. Only peoples own dislike of commuting keeps commute times down. Self-driving cars will make long commutes more tolerable, and thus raise the limiting factor on commutes.
I predict that if level-5 self-driving cars become a reality, we'll see a new type of dystopian hell, where it's common to spend 6+ hours a day commuting. It will be especially burdensome for those who are poor and have to drive their car manually.
Suddenly I'm less excited about self-driving cars.
City planning in the US is a mess though right now.
Yes, cheaper trips will lead to more trips and therefore more congestion.
But there are also advantages of having a massive car network.
There are actually plenty of roads for most of the time. It's only during rush hour that you have congestion (LA being an exception).
Rush hour traffic happens due to people commuting to work, usually one person in a car.
The density of rush hour traffic makes it easy to optimize.
Without changing cars, we can put 4 people in a car, which is 2-4x better than the common commute of 1 person in a car.
People don't want to share cars?
Implement rush hour pricing scheme that heavily penalizes single occupancy (say, $4 for shared ride, $16 if you want a car to yourself).
The next step would be to make mini-buses for rush hour traffic: at lest 12-16 person. Once you know the traffic patterns, you can optimize by building cars / busses with the capacity that fits the pattern.
What makes it even easier is that rush hour traffic is stable: people go to work and back roughly in the same numbers, which means you can do long-term predictions and investments.
Unless commute patterns change dramatically, in the morning most people will be going downtown to jobs, there will be a few that live in downtown and go to jobs elsewhere, but by and large, all of the cars will be bringing in commuters from outside of down and dropping them off in downtown centers -- there will be no other human looking for a ride from that car.
Without changing cars, we can put 4 people in a car, which is 2-4x better than the common commute of 1 person in a car.
We can do that today, but we don't. It's not clear why a self-driving car would change that. How often do people take uber-pool instead of having a car to themselves? (I don't know the answer to that question).
People don't want to share cars?
Maybe they won't want to, but as autonomous cars become more popular, only the affluent will make that choice - a car is expensive, especially when it sits in a garage at home and work (that you pay for) unused for 22 out of every 24 hours.
(Fixing this is easier said than done, though.)
However, we’re probably only 10-15 years away from EV’s becoming cheaper than ICE. At that point, we could stop the subsidy.
That’s about how long it takes to complete any mass transit project in the United States.