There is nothing that a driver would do that an automated taxi would not, because both the driver and the automated taxi are optimizing for their ability to give as many rides as possible for as much money as possible.
The main reason to think their behavior would differ is on the margins where drivers have to go home and sleep and robotaxis do not. But that really makes it likely that a robotaxi service will keep its cars out 24/7 except for maintenance.
The other reason to believe drivers and robotaxis will behave differently is if you think drivers are leaving money on the table, or robotaxis will. And Silicon Valley simply does not leave money on the table. I'd be more ready to believe the drivers do.
There's another other factor here: when you make cars more available and more convenient, people are more likely to take them. So robotaxis will probably increase, not decrease, road usage, if only because they never need to sleep, eat, or go to the bathroom. They will just repeatedly get a fare, drive the fare, and go do whatever they do to be idle. Which, in many cities, is going to be "wander the streets" or "take up parking spots in the city center".
EDIT: I had responded to this without reading the OP article. The article has some good discussion of the kinds of secondary effects that are likely to cause robotaxis to increase road consumption.
You've gone from "People won't have to drive", to "People cannot drive". And the latter will likely play poorly in rural areas.
Please tell me your plan is not to have the cars speed up where all the pedestrians are
How? If we replace every car driven by an individual with a car driven by machine… you’re left with the same number of cars. Just as much traffic. Still need all the roads. And parking lots unless the cars drive more to avoid parking.
Better for the environment? I don’t see it. Every car taken off the road (including EVs!) is less polluting. Less fuel. Less maintenance. Less pavement needed. Less particle emissions from wearing down tires. Moving people to walking, bikes, busses, subways, whatever is better than individual cars.
More time in your day because you’re not driving during your commute? What if we set things up so you don’t have to commute so far? Or at all. Either one would be better even with automation driving for you.
Between the pandemic’s changes in traffic patterns and seeing other cities around the world change I’ve come to the realization we could have so much more than what we have today but with robots driving for us. We can ask for more. We can change more than one thing at once.
And what we do doesn’t have to be decided by a tech company just doing something. That may not be the best policy. It may be a waste of money. It may be a real part of the solution!
We can want more. Instead robotaxis are clogging streets and blocking ambulances and we’re celebrating “progress”.
If all vehicles - not just cars - were driven by machines and connected to a network then there are many optimisations that they could be doing. For example you could get rid of traffic lights, yielding rules, even lanes. Cars could travel much faster if they didn’t have to worry about reaction times.
For example cars could go through intersections at full speed or close to it, timing it so they passed between each other. Cars could actually merge onto freeways and change lanes at full speed without some jerk trying to block them. You wouldn’t have slow drivers in the fast lane.
You're talking about a system where one kid running into the road could cause a chain collision of dozens of cars that were counting on rushing the intersection at high speed. Or, alternatively, could end up with the kid getting hit at 45 miles an hour, with extremely fatal and destructive results.
Maybe the car detects the kid earlier. But that's not guaranteed; if the kid runs out from between two parked cars, for example, there may not be sufficient time at higher speeds for the car to stop.
People behave unpredictably. Hell, even when they behave predictably and cross at the crosswalk when they’re supposed to, they can still get hit by cars.
That said, on-street parking does have the benefit of placing a multi-ton shield between traffic and pedestrians and cyclists. Slower speeds and better street design can at least lessen the likelihood of fatal accidents when people pop out between parked cars.
Slower speeds work for sure, but getting a robo taxi to adhere to those slower speeds is much more realistic than getting a human driver to do the same.
The answer is to take that into account with traffic calming measures[0] that alter the street design and make it more stressful for drivers. Narrower lanes, big trees overhanging the street, small traffic circles, pinchpoints, and other measures making driving fast very uncomfortable. You feel like you need to pay more attention, and drivers naturally slow down as a result.
0. https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-...
Even if you could get 90% on board, the other 10% will fight to the death over it.
Which means the benefits of a 100% automated system (which I disagree with BTW), can’t be reached except possibly after a VERY long time when enough anti-robos have changed their minds/died out.
This would be taking something away from drivers. And that’s what people hate. Look at the responses to congestion taxes or toll roads. Or even traffic jams!
People behave as if they have a right to use any (seemingly) public road just because they have a car. Even private toll roads.
It’s not feasible.
That kind of system precludes the presence of pedestrians and cyclists.
You'll still need crosswalks to allow pedestrians to cross the street. Beyond that, the mere possibility of a kid running into the street means that your theoretical maximum speed is basically the same as it is now, simply due to physics: even if cars can instantly detect a person trying to cross the road, you still need time to brake and come to a stop. That doesn't change whether it's a computer driving the car or a human. Speeding up autonomous traffic basically undermines the biggest advantage--360 degree awareness and faster-than-human reaction times--AVs should offer.
As for intersections where cars zip through the gaps between cars with minimal spacing, that's a pipe dream simply because you're cutting safety margins to nearly zero. Signals drop out and computer processes crash. Car sensors will pick up false positives.
Car brakes and tires wear down over time, which will cause the car's performance to deviate from what everyone's models will expect. Bald tires? Winter tires in summer? Summer tires in winter? Maybe your car tries to take into account tire wear, but what happens if they're out of balance or alignment and the tread wears unevenly? What about the autonomous SUV that's loaded nearly at its maximum load thanks to the home improvement supplies the person bought at Home Depot?
The sort of carefully choreographed ballet you're envisioning[0] falls apart in catastrophic fashion the moment a single car comes along that doesn't behave as expected. If one car slams on the brakes to avoid a kid, a ball bouncing into traffic, a barrel that fell over, or any of the million other examples of things that happen in a complex environment, you get a massive multi-car collision, and because we're now moving faster than would have been possible before, you're going to get casualties.
So you need to slow traffic flow and increase the distance between cars to create a larger safety margin. That cuts down on the expected advantages, and you wind up much closer to existing traffic flows than the imagined ballet. And even if we choose to ignore the possibility of failure, at the end of the day, roads are a finite surface. There's still a physical limit to the number that can physically fit on a given stretch of road. AVs could, theoretically, push that number higher by removing some of the factors that decrease capacity, but there's still a limit. They can't solve the problem of congestion.
There's also the human element. Even if you "know" the cars are communicating with one another and you'll safely shoot through the intersection, those pesky human brains--you know, the ones that evolved to notice predators on the edge of a person's field of vision before those predators managed to rush up and eat you---are going to positively lose their shit the second they see a car speeding towards them on what appears to be a collision course at 50 miles an hour. That kind of intersection is pretty much perfect for triggering those fight-or-flight stress responses, and they'll make the stress of even the worst of LA traffic look positively pleasant by comparison.
Can AVs do a lot to improve traffic? Sure, assuming they don't increase the number of vehicles on the road--which is unlikely, to say the least. Anyhow, even the less-capable levels of automation could decrease things like phantom traffic jams. But we'll never see the kind of traffic ballets you're talking about save, perhaps, things like highway on-ramps.
Hell, I bet the Luddites from back in the day wouldn't have minded the technological progress if they had their needs met otherwise.
They weren’t anti-tech. They were workers who saw the first industrialization destroying their safe well paying jobs at home that gave them autonomy and replaced it with them having to be generic low paid cogs in a very dangerous factory they had to commute to with no say over their working conditions.
They wanted a say over their destiny. Some autonomy. A share of the benefits that came with technology instead of all the downsides with 100% of the upside going to the rich owners.
Any of that sound familiar to things workers complain about today?
From the podcast 99% Invisible: Blood in the Machine
If you don't have a solution for that then you can just sit down and STFU.