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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Maybe.

On the other hand, ride sharing could mean less cars overall and less car ownership. Electric cars mean fewer or no emissions. Totally automated traffic management could enable vastly higher throughput, and otherwise congested roads could have dynamic tolls applied so people won't use them unless they really need to. Delivery vehicles can batch shopping pickups and dropoffs to use less vehicles than currently.

If problems arise, they can be fixed through policy and incentives. Otherwise, traditional economic incentives for efficiency continue to apply.

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Tires emit a fair amount of micro plastics. There's no such thing as zero emission cars.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/11/car-tire...

All the more reason to shift to a pay-per-use model rather than the high-fixed-cost model of car ownership, which incentivizes uses your car for as many trips as possible once you've made the initial expenditure to buy the thing. If these get good enough and cheap enough that significant numbers of people can get away with ditching their cars, those people will probably end up in a situation where transit (including kinds with no tires) will be cheaper on a per-trip basis where it's practical, and robocars will make sense for the remainder.

All the more reason Americans should just try learn and adapt to public transport.

public transport as implemented in Asia and Europe, especially for last (couple) mile sort of uses is an antiquated idea in a world of self-driving. In a city like San Francisco you could literally ban cars in downtown and have the local transit authority run something like Uber pool of cars that fit 4 passengers comfortably and do point 2 point transit with optimized routing 24/7. The reason buses/trains are so large is to amortize a bunch of things, not the least of which is the driver.

Bodies needing to go anywhere might become an antique idea very soon… the only reason roads exist is so you can go do work and pay taxes and make wealthy people more wealthy.

After that isn’t important, let’s see how much priority roads will get.

that too, in the long-term, living in meatspace will be an expensive privilege reserved for the wealthy

Which is funny because it’s exactly the opposite to what Silicon Valley is selling to us…

I'm definitely not disputing that, although I think "emissions" are generally understood to be airborne. Micro plastics that run off the road into storm water are pollution for sure, but "emissions" seems misleading.

And obviously fewer/no emissions is also referring just to operation, not manufacture or disposal or power plants either.

From the linked article: "A study published in July suggests that vast quantities of tire fragments find their way into the ocean not just via rivers and waterways, but also through the air. Swept on the wind, they drift far from where they were shed. The study warned that so many tire particles are landing in the Arctic that they pose a climate-change risk."

I mean, driverless buses (or perhaps minibuses or vans, depending on density) are the way to go.

But... there's another dimension here. Would you share a car with a random stranger with no "trusted" third-party (i.e. the driver) present?

I would if the "bus" was small, traveled more like an uber pool (to my destination rather than along a corridor with 30 useless stops a block apart), and if the identity of those strangers was known to a system that could then remove their ability to hail future rides if anything went down.

But what about the dystopian flip side? You commit a crime once and suddenly you aren’t allowed to travel, otherwise the other passengers would feel unsafe? Or your transportation costs increase by 5x to account for you needing private-only accommodation?

Sounds like a great way to isolate someone and make sure there is no chance of rehabilitation, being shunned by the car swarm and isolated away

totally, I think the social credit score system in China, background checks for employment, no-fly lists are all things we should look at when building such systems. Ultimately though it's not going to be fair, I don't really care for subway performance arts as practiced in urban metro systems and I'd vote to eject and ban the artists, whereas someone else might find that to be an authoritarian overreach

but how would the driverless vehicle know that something went down? reports from other passengers? What if the other passengers are lying? Or simply don't like you? So the vehicle will have to surveil the passenger conversations and actions and beam it up to Waymo or Cruise (ok, that's fine, a human driver would do that too). But who will look at the surveillance? An algorithm? And, what if they say you are smelly? The microphone and camera won't pick that up...

And the smelly (or messy) passenger problem doesn't even require ridesharing! Who will clean the previous passenger's McNugget crumbs off your seat?

all of these are pre-existing problems with public transport that have solutions along the anarchy<->totalitarianism spectrum, with US, European and Asian mega-cities' transit agencies serving as illustrative examples of tradeoffs of various approaches. I'm not sure how self-driving changes the game, ain't nobody helping you when the foil and torch lighter comes out on BART late at night.

Well typically you're not the only other one the train (at the very least there's an operator). Somehow sitting in a small car next to someone else feels different.

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