Self-driving cars will cause sprawl

https://medium.com/99-mph/introducing-the-marchetti-a-unit-of-measure-for-transit-379aa51170a4?TrucksFoT

by aresant • 8 years ago

51 65 8 years ago

PeterStuer• 8 years ago

All will depend on whether people will still feel being chauffeured around in a self driving vehicle as 'travel time'. With few restrictions, you can design an autonomous light truck to be like a true 'mobile home-office/bedroom/apartment'. My personal prediction is that when we get to true AV's, it will be an ecological disaster, clogging roads orders of magnitude more than today.

trevyn• 8 years ago

Thought experiment to help you improve your prediction power in general: Imagine that your prediction was wrong. What are some possibilities for why it was wrong?

Simon_says• 8 years ago

Oo, that's a good one.

usrusr• 8 years ago

The next step could be hooking up that self-driving mobile home to plumbing infrastructure on the company parking lot. Trailer park company town, here we come.

I share your concerns though, that we will get stuck with an automobile version of the representational train cars of the steam age unless we find ways to channel autonomous driving into mode-independent transportation as a service. Uber as a transitional saviour? Never thought I would write this.

Next requirement: replace/upgrade street parking with theftproof mooring clamps for parcel delivery containers that can then be much smaller than a car (sized as needed), and that could be self-driving or dropped/picked up by a "mothership" truck depending on urgency and/or technology. With that service in place, you could just summon transportation for your shopping bags, alleviating the trunk anxiety often associated with mode-independent transportation as a service.

em3rgent0rdr• 8 years ago

We need cities that are easily traversed by humans, not cars.

thriftwy4• 8 years ago

They need to be really small for that to work, and what's happening is that only 1M+ or even 5M+ population areas are in demand.

A home to 5M people isn't likely going to be very walkable.

CAT0• 8 years ago

They need to be really small for that to work

That's not true. One solution is the '10 Minute City/Neighborhood' and its guide to decision-making.

sveme• 8 years ago

You can have locally village-like situations in a large city if you have a high enough population density and then connect these local villages with mass transit. I can walk to three movie theatres, all doctors, a university hospital, five or six different supermarkets and a shitload of other shops despite living in an agglomeration of three million. Another similar area is just six stops on the subway away.

Noughmad• 8 years ago

The need to be small geographically. Manhattan is very walkable, and very in demand.

Scarblac• 8 years ago

Add good bicycle infrastructure and it's a lot more doable.

erispoe• 8 years ago

Most large European cities are very walkable. London, Paris or Berlin are really walkable and host millions of people. On the contrary, with the exception of North America, larger cities are usually more walkable than small settlements and rural places.

CalRobert• 8 years ago

Citation massively needed. Plenty of folks walk in cities with more than 5M people (London comes to mind). It's not like you routinely visit every last business in that city.

Also, if you have a bicycle and decent bike network you can traverse an entire major city in 45 - 60 minutes. The problem is that most new cities are virtually nothing but asphalt and empty land in order to accommodate cars. I am sometimes called weird for saying this - but seriously - look at pictures taken at elevation and a modern "city" looks very sparse indeed.

chroem-4• 8 years ago

This is how SF-style housing crises are made. When you force everyone to be very geographically close to their place of employment, it has the dual effects of reducing the effective supply of available housing options, while simultaneously increasing demand for housing in a very specific geographic area. If you look at the cities that have done this, both in the US and abroad, you will notice that their rents are typically astronomical.

vertex-four3• 8 years ago

SF has the issue that certain popular types of work are only available in SF, and if someone wants to be in that type of work, they have very few options for where to live.

More, smaller cities - or even large cities with multiple “city centres” - and an approach which attempts to ensure that the SF centralisation of the consumer tech industry couldn’t be a thing, would be the solution, surely, if you decided to design from top-down?

CPLX3• 8 years ago

The problem with San Francisco is that it's pathologically unable to build apartment buildings.

X6S1x6Okd1st• 8 years ago

That's also how NYC-style housing crises are made, they have 27k people per square mile.

thriftwy4• 8 years ago

I think it would be positive. We will sprawl so much that we end up repopulating much of the area what we left previously.

Suburbua (or sleeper districts) around city core is sprawl. Semi-rural settlements all over the map is not sprawl. It is normawl.

Add more telecommuting and basic income, and we're all set.

bobthepanda3• 8 years ago

Suburbs were also originally supposed to be pastoral garden cities. Usually the ideal of planners and technologists falls prey to the reality of mass-market commoditization.

thriftwy4• 8 years ago

Aren't them? I guess you was never exposed much to other ways of mass urbanization.

Like this: http://www.vsedomarossii.ru/photos/area_77/city_2894/street_...

Or this: https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/v1492112219/artic...

You will have to admit that suburbs are pretty pastoral.

bobthepanda3• 8 years ago

This analysis is flawed. You can already do all of this internet browsing and whatnot that you can't do on a car on commuting modes where you're a passenger; a bus, or on a subway, or sometimes in a carpool. But that doesn't make people tolerate longer commutes on those modes.

chrisseaton• 8 years ago

Yes it does - people commute relatively happily up to two hours on a train - distances most people wouldn't consider driving - precisely because they can work effectively while commuting so they aren't losing time.

apotheothesomai• 8 years ago

Sitting comfortably in a car with space and silence is not sufficiently analogous to public transport for the analysis to be flawed on this account.

And how many people on Caltrain or a major subway can actually even get a seat and space for comfortably sing a laptop during commuter hours?

rwmj• 8 years ago

This could be some US thing, but in Europe trains are quiet and comfortable enough that plenty of people work/commute on them.

And anyway it's not like modern offices are quiet, interruption-free workspaces either.

jedberg• 8 years ago

I had no problem commuting by train every day for 70 minutes plus the 20 minute drive to the train station, each way. Because I could get work done on the train.

JoachimS• 8 years ago

I'm probably dim. But I fail to understand why self driving cars will make the congestions in morning and evening commutes be radically reduced.

If the wall described in the article is to be pushed out, the speed must increase from today.

If we can go to work and go home at more varying times over a day then yes congestion should decrease. But why would AVs cause that effect? As long as everybody is expected to be at the office at 8am and leave at about 5pm, we need to move the same amount of people back and forth at the same time. Ride sharing (hey buses and metros are efficient for that!) may make the number of vehicles/person go down.

colordrops3• 8 years ago

The amount of vehicles a road can handle before becoming congested is dependent on the safe distance needed between cars at a particular speed, the reaction time of drivers, and the consistency and coordination of driving styles.

You won't see any improvements from AVs until human drivers are banned, after which the AVs can all drive at 100 mph and inches apart from each other. Traffic lights would also no longer be necessary.

adrianN2• 8 years ago

You would also have to ban pedestrians and cyclists.

CPLX3• 8 years ago

AVs can all drive at 100 mph and inches apart from each other

Hard to see how this could ever go wrong isn't it

yAnonymous2• 8 years ago

You won't see any improvements from AVs until human drivers are banned

Automatically re-routing traffic when the roads start being congested already works before that and it'll help a lot.

sn412• 8 years ago

Is human reaction time is the only reason for enforcing safe driving distance?

Even if AI increases to great levels, inertia still would exist. A large truck cannot stop in inches when traveling at 100 mph.

narag• 8 years ago

You forgot the most important factor: the exits. If the exits are congested because capacity is lower near the destination, there's nothing you can do in the road.

And most jams are caused exactly by this.

onion2k• 8 years ago

after which the AVs can all drive at 100 mph and inches apart from each other

Except... it's likely that people won't own AVs of their own, so we'll be captive passengers inside a corporation's AV. That's a prime advertising opportunity. Why have an AV that gets people from A to B as quickly as possible when you can go at 55mph without needing to change the law and get double the time with the passenger?

HeyLaughingBoy• 8 years ago

Traffic lights would also no longer be necessary

How will pedestrians know when to cross the road? Will bicycles also become illegal?

chomp• 8 years ago

They won't, it's something AV proponents love to claim though.

The claim is that cars will be able to drive closer at higher speeds or something. But, 2 tons of steel is still a deadly weapon no matter who's driving it. A car can still suffer a(n unpredictable) blowout or mechanics failure, malicious people can still screw with traffic, roads and infrastructure will still be poorly funded, and even wildlife (deer specifically) still exist.

Any of these things will cause huge problems to cars travelling too close together. That's even ignoring the fact that traffic going inbound to dense urban centers is limited by the infrastructure of the city and layout of those roads, parking garages, and businesses- not the speed at which people can travel closely on the road.

By the time we get level 5 autonomous vehicles, we'll have robots performing most minimum wage jobs (picking crops, making coffee and hamburgers, retail) and culture will probably have shifted to a remote-work-friendly mindset. The fact that there just won't be that many jobs for people to work will reduce traffic more than AVs will "because they can go faster".

Balgair• 8 years ago

Numberphile had a recent video on car crashes here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3D7XYQExt0

In short: Since kinetic energy goes as (velocity)^2, doubling the speed will quadruple the stopping distance (MANY other factors are significant, this is a rough estimate). 3X of the speed is ~9X the stopping distance, etc.

NHTSB guidelines for 'proper' following distance are nearly never seen in LA and NYC, it's typically much shorter. If anything, L5 AVs will probably have longer gaps between AVs than what is currently on the road. Likely, the major improvement of L5 AVs will be in safety, not congestion. It turns out (I think), you can't technology your way out of a political problem. We need higher density housing, not magic carpets (effectively).

Gibbon1• 8 years ago

Self driving minibuses solves mass transits last mile problem just saying. Cause no one is mentioning that.

Self driving cars aren't going to make peoples commutes from Tracey to Moutainview any faster.

yAnonymous2• 8 years ago

There need to be better parking solutions for any of that to actually happen.

rdlecler1• 8 years ago

We shouldn’t blame autonomous vehicles. Unaffordable housing is causing sprawl.

calvinbhai• 8 years ago

I think there's a simple solution:

Zone to Zone travel tax based on time of the day.

This tax wont apply to public transit, or shared rides (like UberPool, Lyft Line, Waze carpool etc). Applies to all other vehicles, even AV if it is a personal/commercial use thats not meant for shared rides, even if HOV (so that fewer people are looking for parking, blocking / flooding the streets in am/pm due to parking).

any thoughts?

Self-driving cars will cause sprawl

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