How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/disruptions-how-driverless-cars-could-reshape-cities/

by sethbannon • 13 years ago

120 190 13 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

This is not unrelated to last week's discussion "Why Green Architecture Hardy Ever Deserves the Name"[1]. The urban form that allows and requires the car is an obsolete artifact of the "oil interval" which is passing into history. In the future you will neither need nor want a car, driverless or otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5995141

fennecfoxen2• 13 years ago

Replaced by the natural-gas interval, no doubt. ;) :P

sukuriant• 13 years ago

Well, I might still want a car, personally. Remember horses. They went from tools of transportation to pets and recreational 'vehicles'

toomuchtodo4• 13 years ago

Until everything or everyone I interact with is within walking or public transit distance of me, I'll still require a car. Not everyone I know wants to live in the city with me. Not all of my service providers will be in the city with me.

fennecfoxen2• 13 years ago

"There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl."

Gotta love the NYTimes for the tendentious moralizing. People having more choice, and exercising it, is a risk! Attempts to have a backyard or extra bedrooms, or just pay less for real estate, are dangerous and wrong. Worse, if you can buy extra bedrooms you might be tempted to have kids and we wouldn't want any of those consuming the Earth's precious resources would we :P

(Not that there isn't anything to be said in support of that point. But it's tendentious and moralizing all the same.)

johnrob• 13 years ago

Urban sprawl is bad from an energy (and consequently environmental) perspective because people and supplies require longer trips.

old-gregg• 13 years ago

"People exercising their choice" sounds nice, but there will always be limits imposed by the society. You cannot "exercise your choice" to commute in a school bus today.

Zoning restrictions in the cities exist for the same reason: people just don't respect each other enough to trust them with their choices. Personally I cannot stand HOAs, yet another level of bureaucracy and taxation to deal with, but I will not argue with the fact that HOA buildings/neighborhoods are nicer than "free" ones.

toomuchtodo4• 13 years ago

"Nicer" is relative.

mlwarren• 13 years ago

"There are [environmental] risks, of course"

I think what they're getting at is the environmental risks and not implying that the benefits you described are anything bad.

oftenwrong2• 13 years ago

It would only increase choice for people who can afford a car, the cost of operating a car, and the extra travel time. For people who cannot, urban sprawl is a severe limit to their choice.

roc2• 13 years ago

The problem is that the costs of sprawl aren't effectively conveyed to the commuter. The increased costs of infrastructure, road maintenance, etc aren't remotely made up for in vehicle, property or fuel taxes.

In which case, yes, it's a risk if it continues. Hell, it's a risk if it doesn't decline as the US approaches a GDP-growth situation not-unlike Japan's.

(Where per-capita GDP may continue growing, but net GDP barely moves due an aging populace and declining birth-rate.)

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

Dramatic urban sprawl is generally considered a bad thing by almost everyone, not just NYTimes.

RHSeeger• 13 years ago

That being said, if someone can make an extra 40k/year by commuting 4 hours a day, it may very well be worth it to them. The difference in earning potential between commuting to the local city and not can be dramatic.

LaGrange2• 13 years ago

Decentralization is horrible from environmental standpoint. It also makes cities much less pleasant, it hurts the ability to create useful schools, it horribly limits the pool in which those kids you mentioned can find friends. It makes it almost impossible to provide good public transportation (which is the sensible way to achieve things from this article, see my fav snark at electric cars as well: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=552497834771072&set=...). Backyards? We have parks! Bedrooms? Unless you're in Paris or a teenager stuck up on living in the Pijp, you will get bedrooms. Together with places to go out into, for example.

Zigurd4• 13 years ago

If I could snooze in my driverless car overnight, I would ride instead of subjecting myself to the current flying experience for any such trip of 10 hours or less.

angersock• 13 years ago

If you honestly think that urban sprawl is anything other than an inefficient allocation of fixed resources, you aren't looking at the big picture.

Having a backyard is not needed if you have lots and parks to play in and walk dogs; the American suburb idea of a little villa for each person is stupid and wasteful and wouldn't confer any advantages if you fixed the underlying insecurities people had about the hospitality of their own community.

elchief9• 13 years ago

So driverless taxis will be cheap.

Taxi medallions are licenses by the city for taxi companies, to prevent abuse. But if the software is certified, you don't really need the medallions. Drop $500,000 off the cost of a taxi.

You don't have to pay the 2 drivers that normally share a cab. Drop $80,000 a year off.

Assuming the cars no longer crash (version 2.0?), drop $10,000/year off for taxi insurance.

Combine that with Google-quality routing, and smart-phone taxi ordering, and you're looking at a major price drop for taxi service, assuming some sort of competition. I'm guesstimating a 50-75% drop.

Most people in cities will opt out of owning their own car, and use robo-taxis.

You are looking at an 80-85% drop in the required number of cars in cities (even accounting for current peak traffic volumes. see the KPMG report. I also came to the same number back-of-the-envelope).

Obviously, this will destroy GM and Toyota. Might be good for Tesla as they are still tiny, and I'm sure Elon and Larry have discussed this.

Some other interesting outcomes:

- should increase the total number of trips and miles driven, as lower prices lead to higher quantity demanded, so more wear and tear on cars, and more gas consumed (though less for idling).

- with many driverless cars, they can communicate with each other, driving faster and closer together, and co-ordinating intersection crossing. price of oil change is ambiguous.

- fewer deaths and injuries from accidents, or none at all. The organ transplant industry dies.

- more trees and less concrete lead to cooler cities?

- you can probably get away with more single-lane streets, with no parking, increasing usable land areas in cities by 25%, significantly dropping housing prices.

- in your driverless car, you can talk on your cell, use your laptop, read a book, not be stressed from driving. people may be willing to drive farther to work, increasing sprawl, and also dropping the quantity demanded for housing near the core, dropping prices.

- public transit disappears? though driverless buses would be cheaper too.

- more people bike to work, as it's much safer

- software requirement: interior management for driverless taxis. some video or image recognition for lost purses, people having heart attacks, people throwing up in the back seat.

oftenwrong2• 13 years ago

Or they might keep the prices high and keep the difference in operational cost as profit.

elchief9• 13 years ago

Correct, hence the competition assumption. City managers will need to be wary of any long-term deals offered by taxi companies in the coming years. Or buy yourself a taxi company now!

criley22• 13 years ago

One company keeps the profit. The next one undercuts the hefty margin to steal customers. The first lowers prices to be competitive.

I mean, something like five+ companies are working on some level of autonomous cars. It's not like we're looking at a future monopoly on the production of them.

CBC4405• 13 years ago

Keeping current margins would mean 1000% profit margins since the actual cost of ownership is surprisingly low. The cabby's cut, down time, and the medallion's costs (both up front and in supply restriction) make up the vast majority of fare today.

joshdance• 13 years ago

Taxi medallions are a byproduct of a past age. They should not exist as they do today.

Great article, with research, here - http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of...

mahyarm• 13 years ago

Today's electric cars would be used for many of these things even they have 80 mile batteries, since the taxi company can manage charging levels very easily. They will end up using it just on a cost basis alone since the cars are cheaper on a marginal basis than gas. Most people don't need a gas car for most of their driving. A tesla model S would do even for most people in large cities today. It's only when you would want to go on long distance road trips that you would need a gas car.

Just this weekend, me and my roomate went on a road trip to san diego and we rented a car because he didn't want to put the ~1200 miles on his car.

zanny3• 13 years ago

Also, since it isn't "your" car, it is perfectly reasonable that on a longer taxi trip the cars just drive to a taxi depot when low on battery and have you switch cars or have the cars switch batteries (as demonstrated by Tesla).

I don't think any of the autopilot cars will be gas guzzlers. By the time they are allowed for consumer use as taxis, the Tesla 300 mile range battery will be half as expensive.

yajoe• 13 years ago

One important consideration: displacing the number of people who drive for a living in a community will be politically difficult. Ever notice how the vegas monorail stops short of the airport? We'll have to suffer a couple generations of protections before the long-run utopia I read in your comment.

Perhaps innovators will offset the protections by having +2 passenger seats in a standard sedan? Or a new car design altogether to side-step arbitrary rules?

elchief9• 13 years ago

Agreed, though no one really cares (politically) about taxi and limo drivers. Truck driver and bus driver unions will certainly have something to say.

JulianMorrison• 13 years ago

We have to stop predicating people's livelihoods on work. Because, most work is going to be automated away, and the only choice we as a society have is: does that mean we all retire, or does that mean we're all sacked?

The status quo path leads to chaos.

danielharan• 13 years ago

I wonder how some of those effects interact.

If a van in my neighbourhood is ready to pick up anyone going to the closest bus-rapid transit stop, those stops can be even further apart.

Besides the dropping house prices, increased density will increase the number of pedestrians and cyclists, as well as those retail services that cater to the carless.

pogden• 13 years ago

some other ones: -More electric cars. Robotaxis have higher utilization rates, so it makes the fuel-captial tradeoffs of electric cars much more appealing. Additionally, the range point becomes moot. Taking a trip longer than one taxi can get you on a charge? Just have a new one come pick you up halfway through.

-More multi-mode trips, some car trips are just to have a car available for the return trip (e.g. "Let's take separate cars because you have to leave earlier than I do" or "I would take the BART to SF, but it won't be running at 3 AM when i need to come home").

- cars that actually match their necessary capacity. Lots of people buy trucks, vans, and SUVs for the 10% of the time they really need them. Even 5-seat sedans are overkill for most trips. One-passenger robotaxis would hopefully be cheaper due to reduced fuel and manufacturing costs.

-fewer marginal trips. Currently, most costs of car ownership are fixed: insurance, capital, registration. Once you have a car, the only cost to using it more is fuel, so you still take the car for trips where it's only marginally more convenient than alternative transportation.

bubbleRefuge• 13 years ago

On the routing software. Does anyone see this routing working more like a real-time dynamic airline reservation system ? Routes contain legs that maybe get re-spun based upon changes in demand and capacity as vehicles and people enter and exit this network. Cells phones are the portal into the network telling you where the entry/exit/transit points are and wait-time.

elchief9• 13 years ago

Google will know you want to take a trip, even before you do, and put a car nearby ;)

michaelt• 13 years ago

  You are looking at an 80-85% drop in the required number 
  of cars in cities (even accounting for current peak 
  traffic volumes. see the KPMG report. I also came to the 
  same number back-of-the-envelope).

The KPMG report seemed very light on details. I'd be interested in reading a more fully worked through example if you know of one.

In a lot of things like city bike sharing there's an aggregate flow of bikes into the city at 9am and out of the city at 5pm, so trucks have to shuttle the bikes back in the opposite direction. Seems to me if one car shuttled three commuters into the city you'd have 1/3rd the number of cars on the roads, but each car driving 6 times as far as it has to drive out empty to pick up the next fare.

What kind of fill rate do you think it's reasonable to expect for cars driving from the city to the suburbs in the morning rush hour?

elchief9• 13 years ago

Don't have a link for you but I believe that in most cities max 12% of cars are on the road at peak rush hour.

My calculation was based on people using their cars at most 10% of the time, and a utilization rate of robo-taxis at about 60%.

akgerber• 13 years ago

Low-frequency bus-based public transit in midsized cities (mostly provided as a last resort for the poor and elderly) might become outmoded, but there's nowhere near enough roadway space for cars, robotic or not, to replace subways, commuter trains, or even high-frequency buses in dense cities. Mass transit vehicles are, quite simply, much more efficient with space: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-933cKv6thVE/TtJfSd3u-JI/AAAAAAAAAx...

w_t_payne• 13 years ago

To see the future, look to Nairobi's "Mat" system - These vehicles are a sort of hybrid between a large taxi and a small bus. Whilst officially they travel fixed routes, in reality routes and times can be quickly changed to adapt to shifting patterns of demand. I think the future of transport will look a lot like this.

We need vehicles that are big enough to carry a decent number of people, so that during rush hour the available road-space can be effectively utilised: After all, we want to reduce the overall cost and blight of roads for a given peak level of demand, which means maximising the number of passengers per square metre of tarmac. On the other hand, away from rush hour, we want vehicles that are small enough to flexibly be able to tailor their route to the demands and needs of their passengers - so that individuals can be picked up and dropped off at their front doorstep - and at a time that suits them, rather than according to an inflexible schedule.

These conflicting requirements call for a mix of vehicle sizes - both small and large. If you take the cost of a driver away, then I think the minibus might well hit a sweet spot in terms of size and flexibility - although that is little more than a hunch at the moment.

nickik4• 13 years ago

Taxi medallions are licenses by the city for taxi companies, to prevent abuse.

Yeah thats why 'to prevent abuse' sure.

- fewer deaths and injuries from accidents, or none at all. The organ transplant industry dies.

I have a solution for this, its called, it simply allow people to sell the rights to there organs or even better allow them to sell there organs outright.

elchief9• 13 years ago

But if they don't die nearly as frequently, there will still be less supply of young, quality organs.

mortenjorck• 13 years ago

Thanks, Ayn.

Dewie5• 13 years ago

- in your driverless car, you can talk on your cell, use your laptop, read a book, not be stressed from driving. people may be willing to drive farther to work, increasing sprawl, and also dropping the quantity demanded for housing near the core, dropping prices.

You can't do too much if you're prone to motion sickness.

zanny3• 13 years ago

public transit disappears? though driverless buses would be cheaper too.

I don't think so, I think public transport becomes more important. In the same vein as automated cars reduce human dependence, subways and its ilk can become faster and more automated.

In the end, on-rails 1d motion is still much more efficient than 2d rubber on tarmac motion, and the in case of a short airline flight 1d is still more efficient (because you expend most of your fuel ascending and descending from an airport).

In terms of efficiency though, maybe putting everyone in maglev tube pods and having them input a destination and fly along nanotube personal rails like in the Jetsons will be the future.

zanny3• 13 years ago

and the in case

Never knew I had dyslexia before!

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Its a good swag at effects. I doubt you'd get the cities to 'give back' the space on the streets but it would change how new cities are built. Given how reasonably efficient self driving cars are now, I'm kind of surprised there isn't a move on to make a self driving 'truckway' up and down the state at least. Its got to be easier than hiring drivers and the equipment re-use is huge. Adding technology along the roadbed for extra safety, getting trucks out of the current population on highways, etc etc.

CBC4405• 13 years ago

A Honda Civic's total cost-per-mile (with depreciation) is $0.17 if you're driving 75k/year which is pretty low for a taxi. Even though Civics aren't big cars, the lack of a driver and controls means you can have 2 rows of seats facing each other with a ton of leg room.

Taxi rates would fall so far it would be silly.

Source: Kelley Blue Book.

Kekeli• 13 years ago

Have you considered how many people are going to be out of work?

mertd3• 13 years ago

Why is that a problem?

snogglethorpe2• 13 years ago

- public transit disappears? though driverless buses would be cheaper too.

Driverless cars would be a very poor replacement for public transit in traditional cities. Transit has far, far, higher density than cars do, no matter who's driving them.

The problem with cars, for the most part is the immense amount of space that is dedicated to support them, usually at the expense of all other uses, and of the people living there. Driverless cars would reduce this somewhat, but as a 1-for-1 replacement, not nearly enough to be useful.

Probably the best effect of driverless cars will be the other effects you mention: taxi-type services will get cheaper, thus fewer people will own cars, thus fewer people will feel tempted to drive everywhere, thus other modes will get more use, and cities will become more pleasant as car infrastructure shrinks, thus causing even fewer people to drive, etc, etc.

[and yeah, driverless buses etc, are a great application of the tech, maybe more so than actual cars as they're more amenable to simplifications (dedicated routes with supporting infrastructure, etc)...]

Zigurd4• 13 years ago

I think that's an open question. City busses are only about at parity with cars for fuel economy, due to mostly running at low load factors. That's not a perfect proxy for space, but load factor would be part of the space calculation, too.

However I could see some kind of minibus that could run at both higher density and higher load factor, respond to demand, and sit idle when there is no demand being the optimal kind of vehicle.

joonix• 13 years ago

Perhaps Los Angeles can be reclaimed, then. Turn many of the parking lots into high density housing and parks. I've always thought it such a shameful waste that such rare climate and pleasant topography and geography were wasted with the construction of empty concrete lots and massive jammed freeways everywhere. And such a strain on quality of life to be paralyzed by traffic around you at all times, to see the endless sunshine bathed in the brown hues of vehicle emissions.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

Uuurrghh - we have no idea the real practicality of driver-less cars, small technical / political issues such as needing own lanes for the first ten or more years, processing power and cost, all make this kind of stuff guesswork.

Add to that the combination of other shifts - a move away from everyone into the office at the same time, distributed remote working, shifts in employment vs freelancing - and it all adds up to massive change, but not predicatable change at this level of detail

Fasten your seatbelts, its going to be a bumpy ride, but no-one can tell which bumps we will hit first.

jgrahamc• 13 years ago

How about "How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Car Ownership"?

Why bother owning a car at all? Couldn't I just subscribe to some service that will have a car drive to me when I need it? And when I need a two seater, or a five seater or a seven seater I just tell the smartphone app that? And when the car is dirty is just drives somewhere to be cleaned?

randyrand• 13 years ago

This is already the case in urban environments. Many people do not own cars but just use taxis. I think there are even some subscription taxi services too.

As for why this will probably never take on in less urban environments:

- 5-10 minute wait times (people are inpatient)

- Can't leave belongings in car

- Keeping the car clean would add cost to the service

Dewie5• 13 years ago

This is already the case in urban environments. Many people do not own cars but just use taxis. I think there are even some subscription taxi services too.

There are people that share a small garage of vehicles, or are members of a club that rents out a lot of vehicles on an hourly or daily basis. It seems like an economical choice for people that don't need a car every day, but sometimes. Plus, the assortment of cars is varied so they can probably get things like a van if they are going to move out of their apartment or something.

vecinu• 13 years ago

This argument often pops up and I am confused as to why people think everyone can subscribe to this kind of service.

Owning a car is completely different from renting one temporarily.

ebiester• 13 years ago

It works in some places and not in others. In San Francisco, it would work pretty well. In larger metropolitan areas, it may work with a hub-like form of public transportation. An autocar takes you to the train, which takes you to the destination city, where you can use another autocar or other public transportation to get to your destination.

Will it work in rural areas? Of course not. The sun belt cities may have trouble utilizing it. But the Boston - DC corridor opportunity would be enough to make it worthwhile. Add to that many European cities and there's enough of a market.

brk• 13 years ago

I make a fair number of "quick trips" that are within maybe 5 miles of my house.

Like most suburbs, we have no public transportation. It's not practical for me to bike to these destinations, due to either weather, or bulk/size of items being purchased.

I wouldn't want to have to wait around for as long as the total trip takes just for a car to arrive. I see no problem with owning private vehicles, it would be nice, at times, if my vehicles were more autonomous though.

LaGrange2• 13 years ago

Why bother owning a car at all?

I dunno. In well developed cities people used bikes and public transport instead since decades now. Driverless cars sounds so silly, if I ever used a car, it wouldn't be in the city, be to go out somewhere outside the normal infrastructure.

cj• 13 years ago

Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic.

I wonder how motorcycles would fare.

I'd hate to give mine up, unless driverless cars were faster and cheaper than motorcycles. Perhaps cheaper by means of a partial ownership model, a la netjets.

toomuchtodo4• 13 years ago

You'd move the signaling to the vehicle. I too own a motorcycle, and could see a day when the bike warns me at intersection approaches that I have to give way to an automated vehicle.

enf• 13 years ago

Horribly. Even worse for pedestrians and bicyclists.

CapitalistCartr• 13 years ago

Self-driving cars can completely change our cities, here in America, because our cities are designed around cars. When I don't have to fight for a parking space, I don't need vast car parks around everything. When the cars drive as members of the same team instead of playing cutthroat, we don't need more lanes, more automotive bandwidth. We can remake our cities on our scale instead. Whether we will or not is the question.

jellicle6• 13 years ago

Yay, the weekly driverless car puff piece.

Imagine a city where you don’t drive in loops looking for a parking spot because your car drops you off and scoots off to some location to wait, sort of like taxi holding pens at airports.

What location is that? The magic one? Just "some" location that apparently will magically appear when the magic cars come.

Actually, your driverless car takes up the same room on the road or in the parking lot as everyone else's. YOU don't drive in loops, but your car still does.

Imagine a theatre at 10PM. The show is letting out. Traffic is snarled for five miles in all directions because a theatre's-worth of empty cars have been circling the block for an hour, making sure they are ready to pick up their ever-so-important passengers.

In effect, adding traffic to roads no longer imposes a personal cost on your time - it's only a financial cost on your bank account, which is highly affordable to some people. The same people who currently have 14 cars in the garage of their mansion can now take all 14 cars with them to the Hamptons for the weekend, in case they want to drive one. Just order them to circle the block near your beach house - well, not your block of course, the neighbors would complain, but someone else's block. Maybe the traffic on the Long Island Expressway is terrible, but your 14 empty cars don't care, they'll make it out to the beach house eventually.

Cost of housing getting you down? Just buy a van and a sleeping bag, and order it to drive around randomly all night and arrive at your work at 9AM. Now you've effectively perma-rented a 9'x14' spot on the nation's roads, without paying a cent.

The push for carpooling is a way to use our limited road space more efficiently, by increasing the number of persons per car up from the current average of 1.59. Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down.

Driverless cars are a net negative for the way the world is going, not a net positive.

gfodor5• 13 years ago

I have to say, this is one of the most cynical and unimaginative posts I've ever read on HN. I think you should save it somewhere so you can laugh at yourself if someday driverless cars become prevalent.

The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate. You seem to falling into the trap of thinking that infrastructure will not be updated around the assumption that cars are autonomous, and clever people will not exploit this new reality in ways that benefit the world. To attack your specific example, why do you assume the cars will drive around passenger-less, and not merely continually make productive uses of themselves, such as by servicing other passengers or acting as deliverymen for physical goods? Why do you assume people will own cars in general, when a service which provides on-demand autonomous transportation in clean, well-maintained, up-to-date vehicles will be more convenient, less work, safer, and will be cheaper? Why does the car that drops you off need to be the car that picks you up? Why do you think highways will not become wildly more efficient and safe even if the average passenger per car (one of several metrics of efficiency) goes up? Why do you think parking garages and cars themselves will not be able to be packed in more efficiently and quickly when they can autonomously coordinate their insertion and removal from a fixed area? Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible?

When the assumptions of society change in such a dramatic way (that a human must navigate a road-based vehicle manually) the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting, and more productive use of time and energy. When you're dealing with something as ingrained and as prevalent as the automobile, you're talking about a massive boost in these things across the entire world.

umsm• 13 years ago

You are assuming a society where everyone shares everything. I don't think that's likely with the introduction of cars that drive themselves. Most early adopters may not be "sharers" either, so they may not push the technology in that direction.

I think jellicle is right, that this invention can cause just as much harm as good.

When intelligent people make decisions, they consider the worst and best possible outcomes.

notahacker• 13 years ago

If people wanted an immensely efficient and affordable taxi system instead of the illusion of freedom granted by owning their own four-wheeled icons of conspicuous consumption, they wouldn't need to wait for practical driverless cars.

jellicle6• 13 years ago

If people wanted to share things with others, the world would be an entirely different place. But people are selfish.

The city block you're living on probably only needs one stand mixer, one waffle iron, one clothes iron. You could all just share one of these rarely-used appliances between you. Why don't you?

We could already build the world you are envisioning, trivially. Any municipality in the world could create an excellent fleet of mass transit vehicles - I mean a truly excellent system, capable of getting you anywhere you want to go at a very reasonable price and high speed. But no place does that. It exists nowhere.

Because people want their own cars. They don't want to share. And the cheaper these vehicles get - a requirement for your techno-utopia - the more people want their own.

Do you think Bill Gates' car will be out delivering packages when he's not in it? Okay, now why do you think everyone else is different from Bill Gates?

Why do you even think that centralized parking garages will be as necessary when autonomously controlled vehicles can coordinate to efficiently fill any designated parking space that is road accessible?

That doubles the road problem, not decreases it. The autonomous cars spend four hours in a traffic jam on the two-lane bridge in order to park in the $1.50 parking lot instead of the $2.00 lot. You don't mind because you aren't in them. Anyone who has to actually cross the bridge is screwed. Traffic jams are actually BENEFICIAL to autonomous vehicles - free unpaid parking and low fuel usage - as long as the vehicle isn't needed immediately. Autonomous cars will SEEK OUT and JOIN traffic jams, when not needed, to minimize their cost of operation.

Someone2• 13 years ago

unimaginative? I see plenty of ideas, and wouldn't call all of them obvious.

I also think there is at the very least a core of truth in it. For example, that 30% time gain in not looking for a parking spot. If people now want to spend an hour on travelling and gain 10 minutes that way, it isn't strange to assume that they will be willing to move 10 minutes driving farther into the suburbs (cheaper house, larger garden, etc).

So, I expect traffic to increase. An extra reason for that to happen is that time currently spent operating your car could be spent in other ways. For example, you could watch a full-length movie/do some yoga on your way to work every day. For a movie/yoga enthusiast, that could make the 1.5 hour trip preferable over the 1 hour one, especially since it will come with the cheaper/better housing.

"the downstream effects are hard to predict but undoubtedly will follow the same path all automation has: more efficient, less polluting"

You mean as in "living in a suburb and driving a SUV to work is less polluting than living in the center of town and driving a bicycle or walking to work?"

toasterlovin3• 13 years ago

The positive economic effects and the transformative effect driverless cars will have on society is pretty hard to overstate.

I'm sorry, but (to me) something that makes it more convenient to be an utterly gluttonous consumer of energy is not a positive transformation for society.

Modes of transportation that weigh 10-20 times their payload are not the solution. We should be focusing our attention on ones that weigh < .20 times their payload. Bicycles and feet.

apsec1122• 13 years ago

This is silly. Key points:

- Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars. If people share cars, we only need one car per five or ten people. NYC has only 13,000 taxis for eight million people.

- Having cars drive around in circles wastes lots of expensive gasoline, which someone has to pay for. If gas is $4/gal., the car gets 20 mpg and it drives at 60 mph, we're talking $12 per hour, or $150 to drive around all night.

- Right now, there is nothing illegal, or even difficult, about renting a van, driving out to the middle of nowhere and living in it. Almost no one does so, because it's uncomfortable and inconvenient. Where would you shower, cook, do laundry, etc.?

danielweber3• 13 years ago

I'm a fan of driverless cars but I enjoyed 'jellicle's take. Applied in their most selfish mode, driverless cars could really suck.

Sharing cars might work for people currently using taxis, but 1) why aren't they using taxis right now already, and 2) there are things people like having in their own car. Car seats are a big example for families. And LATCH doesn't work anywhere near as good as it does on paper.

jellicle6• 13 years ago

Driverless cars will reduce the total number of cars, thereby reducing the total space we use to store cars.

Why would you think an invention that makes cars better would reduce the demand for cars?

dclowd99012• 13 years ago

So negative!

Driverless cars allow for the ultimate carpool: Centralized car ownership. I pay a company a determined amount of money every month (say $50, because why the fuck not?), and I have access to a car. Think the best parts of City Car Share + cars that you don't need to somehow find your way to.

Car ownership itself, I can imagine would evolve based on this. Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.

The first users of driverless cars aren't going to be general public; it's going to be exactly what I'm talking about here, and that's going to set the tone of the whole driverless car conversation.

jellicle6• 13 years ago

Who the hell wants to deal with owning and paying for a car for things like hopping over to the grocery store when they can just phone one up, have it take them, and then pick them up.

Well, I don't know, everyone?

Is it the case that everywhere people are yearning for more taxi service, or to own their own vehicles?

Why does "making cars better" result in lowered demand for cars? Is that how it worked for cellphones? Microwaves? Televisions? Anything?

Let's try your argument for cellphones: they're so good and cheap now that people can share them. We could put one in a booth on every corner, and people could just rent them when they needed one. We could call them "payphones".

Maybe we'll try it for washing machines: As washing machines got better and cheaper, people yearned to have fewer of them, shared, in a centralized facility. That's why no one owns a washing machine nowadays and we all just go to laundromats when necessary. Right?

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

Here's the problem with centralized car ownership: Everyone wants access to a car at roughly the same time. Everybody in your "carshare" will want the car at 8AM & 5PM on weekdays, and all day on weekends.

Thus, the "carshare" company will need almost as many cars as it has subscribers- at which point you will be paying $300/month instead of $50/month, comparable to paying a loan on your own car.

Of course, pricing models can pressure some people to give up the car on weekends or drive to work at 7AM, so the "carshare" can indeed have somewhat fewer cars than it has subscribers. However, unless it can cause a dramatic shift in usage and field far fewer vehicles than it has subscribers, the cost of subscribing will be so close to owning a car many people will opt to continue owning their own.

I'm told ZipCar already suffers from this, and by nature is most popular among people who need a car extremely infrequently- a fairly small portion of the population.

sksksk• 13 years ago

To counter your (valid) points...

1. What if self-driving cars ends the idea of car ownership as we know it. Self driving cars turn the concept of driving from one place to another, into getting from one place to another. You could book your commute to work the night before, and a self driving minibus will come and pick you, and 15 other people up.

2. With self driving cars, an existing car park could potentially fit way more cars; cars could just park themselves in super tight, because they don't need to worry about leaving space to give humans access to the cars.

So they wouldn't have to "circle around" while you're watching a movie.

Joeri• 13 years ago

Human nature is such that carpooling does not work unless you make it 'very' financially attractive. We've had decades to figure out a way to make it work, and it hasn't happened, nor will it. The only workable schemes of carpooling i can think of involve driverless cars.

The average users per car matters less than the total usage per car. The bulk of the environmental cost of a car is production. A car once made must be used instead of parked. Dual-purpose vehicles that move people during the commute and goods outside of it will boost usage a great deal, cutting down on the number of vehicles needed.

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

Oh, it's not human nature so much as complexity. Carpooling is most popular for regular commutes at set times, for exactly this reason.

When I decide to visit the hardware store on Saturday, there is probably someone I have never met that I could carpool with. But how do I contact them and arrange a carpool in minutes? If I have to post a listing a week in advance, it just isn't worth it.

will_asouka• 13 years ago

Surely it will only be a minority that will actually own a personal car when a self-driving taxi will be cheap and without the hassle of insurance, servicing etc.

I envisage a variable pricing system where a journey booked earlier is cheaper as it can be fitted in more efficiently, and a significant discount for a vehicle shared with other passengers with similar journeys.

I don't see cars circling with no passengers, I see cars in constant use, only stationary to pick-up/drop-off or recharge. Way more efficient than what we have currently.

greedo3• 13 years ago

Actually, the prices will be cheaper when booked later, as the value diminishes to zero as time runs out. As the airlines and hotels have learned, an empty seat/suite is zero revenue.

DannoHung2• 13 years ago

Why wouldn't there just be on-demand car rentals? Wanna go to the movie? Request a car 5 minutes in advance and the nearest ones with capacity for your passengers show up. Let the car go right after you get to the theater and make another rental call afterwards. Far fewer cars will be in much more use.

Sure there'll be some negative aspects to just renting on demand, but it'll probably be a lot less than the negative aspects of everyone owning a car.

The biggest net negative is the continual replacement of labor with capital, putting more power into the hands of a few.

sliverstorm9• 13 years ago

You are describing ZipCar.

Think carefully- what about your described usage is truly distinct from what ZipCar offers? What significant value-add would an autonomous car provide?

I argue that ZipCar is already a perfect model of what it would be like, because ZipCar already does what you describe.

toasterlovin3• 13 years ago

So, this request a car and it shows up 5 minutes later only works in the densest urban areas. In less dense cities and suburban areas, I don't see how there's any chance. Try ordering a taxi from the suburbs, see how long it takes to show up.

atburrow• 13 years ago

Driverless cars are the anti-carpool - cars driving with zero humans going anywhere, pushing that average down.

How so? Who's to say that the driverless car doesn't pick up another passenger once it drops you off at your destination? Who says consumers even have to be the ones who own the car? There could definitely be a taxi-based system put in place to keep cars efficiently moving people around.

I agree that all of this speculation is wild, but why add artificial constraints on a system that's still in an infancy stage?

roc2• 13 years ago

I think the assumption is that the cars won't literally circle the streets forever and that some parking will remain, just that it can be more efficiently allocated when the proximity from parking-space to destination isn't as-critical. [1]

Though, like you, I am highly skeptical about the curb-side-pickup fairy tale, due exactly the same sorts of situations you describe: concerts, theaters, last call -- even something as routine as picking the kiddies up from school.

People don't seem to realize that if automated cars delivered themselves to the curb at the end of a concert, a 200 space lot would more than wrap an entire city block. [2]

[1] Some breathless fantasists seem to think automated parking will somehow result in more-cars-per-structure, simply assuming valet stands translate into efficiency -- though almost certainly never having been a car porter or valet and knowing it's primarily just a convenience. You're just not going to see the 50-100% space-efficiency gains they seem to imagine.

[2] Assuming a city block of 1/8 of a mile and 20' per parallel space. That's 33ish spots per side of the block, not counting curb-cuts, hydrants, padding for intersections, etc. In reality, a 200 space lot would probably wrap a block twice or more.

apendleton• 13 years ago

I think the assumptions in the article are most applicable to an urban context, where car ownership is already nowhere near 100%, and alternative modes already exist that accommodate concerts, movies, etc. I'm reasonably certain, for example, that none of the movie theaters in the city where I live (Washington, DC) have surface parking lots. People are already used to not driving here, and I don't think the sudden arrival of self-driving cars will mean every single person will want curb-side pickup from the movie theater that's already half a block from a metro station.

jellicle6• 13 years ago

Why would I pay for parking? The streets are free. "Only SUCKERS pay for parking" will be the motto.

People will be hacking their vehicles, right? They can program any behavior they want, right? NYC's off-street parking rates can easily exceed $20/hour. It is CHEAPER to tell your car to drive around aimlessly waiting for you than for it to park. Sure, traffic is miserable. But you aren't in it, so it's okay.

Find 15-minute loading zones. Park there for 15 minutes. Move to another one (your spot immediately taken by another empty vehicle). Repeat.

Park next to fire hydrants at no cost. Use the same visual scanners you use to navigate to detect approaching police and parking enforcement, and if one is detected, drive away.

There are limitless opportunities for self-serving behavior that ends up being hugely anti-social when any significant portion of the population does it. Basically there are three choices:

1. self-driving cars are locked down as all hell, The Man controls them all (proactive enforcement)

2. all the bad stuff is fined out the wazoo - Arab sheiks and Steve Jobs just pay the tickets, but no one else does - (reactive enforcement)

3. self-driving cars create a miserable traffic situation for everyone, in a massive tragedy of the commons problem (no enforcement)

saraid216• 13 years ago

I'd treat this criticism as a list of issues to resolve, rather than an argument for your conclusion.

One thing I'd be interested in hearing explored: if we manage to reach a critical mass of driverless cars, can we start orchestrating their timing and pathing so that traffic light usage can be minimized? Traffic is modeled as a flow, but AFAIK there isn't another flow out there where we actually have near-total control over the movement of individual particles.

larubbio5• 13 years ago

Couldn't that "location" be a parking lot? The article did mention that some 25 - 30% of a city is devoted to the car today. Some of that is the street, street parking and parking lots. Why would the car circle instead of 1) returning home 2) performing a secondary function (delivery, driving another family member) or 3) parking?

ramblerman• 13 years ago

You're correct that the article is a puff piece, twisting the notion that suddenly all streets are going to be parking free. Your vision of cars endlessly circling events and houses day and night is even more absurd and completely disregards the cost of petrol.

But, somehow you then end your argument with: "therefore driverless cars are bad". As if this stupid future envisioned by the article is now the only possible future for driverless cars.

fudged71• 13 years ago

Highways and empty parking spots will be used for driverless car parking during off-hours. When leaving a movie theatre, you will need to enter a digital queue.

greedo3• 13 years ago

Some of the hype we're hearing about driverless cars reminds me of the hoopla surrounding the Segway. Other than niche cases, neither will have much impact in the next 20 years.

CBC4405• 13 years ago

Wouldn't that location be those distant lots that are always empty now? That real estate is mostly wasted today because nobody wants to walk 2-3 miles and transportation options are either slow, expensive, or unavailable. You call your car right when the show lets out (maybe you can even set an alarm 10 minutes before its over if you're a good planner) and it's there after a comparatively short wait. Even overly congested airports like JFK have abandoned lots within a 10 minute drive.

I also don't see the point about traffic jams. How would they be any worse than a parking garage hemorrhaging visitors at the end of every event like we have today? I can't see the situation being anything but improved by having the cars already out on the side of the main road ready to head in the right direction.

Techpope• 13 years ago

I always hated cars, maybe not having humans be in charge of them will decrease my hate.

Dirlewanger2• 13 years ago

"And the regulatory issues to be addressed before much of this could come true are, to put it mildly, forbidding."

Yeah, how about the massive laundry list of liability issues that come around without a human controlling the wheel? What happens if the car hits a biker? A pedestrian? Another car with a driver? Another driver-less car? The driver causes an accident and then blames it on the car (surely logs of some sort will prevent this, but this all has to be established). So. Many. Scenarios. And bloggers always seem to avoid this topic because no one wants to deal with all this necessary clout must be sorted out before these things ever become an actual thing. To me, they have a looonnnggg way to go before I feel comfortable behind a 2 ton moving death machine and have no control whatsoever.

elchief9• 13 years ago

Right, except they won't crash. Google has driven almost a million km without an accident.

The car takes in a gigabyte of data a second to analyze. It knows the biker is behind it. It will slow down if the situation is risky and stop if something is imminent.

The car has 360° cameras and LIDAR and records everything.

danielweber3• 13 years ago

Google has driven almost a million km without an accident

What's the latest on this? Last I heard they were only at 250,000 miles.

Dirlewanger2• 13 years ago

Cmon, you and I both know software is never perfect. You can spout all the facts you want about how safe it is but it would be ludicrous of both the government and Google not to take into account what happens when something goes haywire and the panoply of scenarios that could occur.

mcguire2• 13 years ago

"Google has driven almost a million km without an accident."

Current rates in the United States, for normal, run-of-the-mill automobiles, is about 1 fatality per 100,000,000 vehicle/miles[1] and 1 "crash" per 500,000 vehicle/miles[2].

1. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

2. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/safety-in-numbers-chart...

btbuildem• 13 years ago

As a cyclist, I would feel more safe knowing that cars are programmed to give me ample space on the road and pass with a safe speed differential.

Zigurd4• 13 years ago

Hey, YC, how about a collision avoidance transponder for bikes that makes a bike look like a car to collision avoidance systems?

ctdonath• 13 years ago

parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be.

Unintended consequences spew from: "then what?"

How much traffic (and energy waste) will come from parked cars deciding "I'm not supposed to be here any more, the 0.5 hour max parking time has expired, now I must leave and find another parking spot until Master summons me"? What "strange attractors" may arise from the chaos of dozens/hundreds/thousands of cars programmatically cycling thru "go park yourself" scenarios? Will parking spaces likewise be self-managing, negotiating with driverless cars over "first come first served" vs "reservations" vs "highest bidder" pricing & availability? How well will a self-parking car deal with grocery carts left in otherwise available spots? How will people game/abuse the system? People regularly leave cars illegally parked because they know the odds of being ticketed in the couple minutes overage costs less than completing what they're doing; how annoyed will you be when returning to your parked car, only to find it left 30 seconds ago to find another parking spot (location as yet unknown), and summoning it will require another 5-10 minutes for it to get back to you? What of "can't get there from here" scenarios: the car reserves a parking spot, and along the way gets trapped in a one-lane road behind a stopped (breakdown, double parked, unloading) vehicle...now what?

Sure, the problems will be solved. Getting to the point where they need solving will enjoy much schadenfreude, and solving them will be interesting - and profitable. Eventually it will all sort out, akin to us living today what Clifford Stoll decried as inane to expect from 1995. In the meantime, I'll be looking for a manual-transmission manual-drive Jeep to get around the strange attractors of flocks of low-IQ vehicles.

danielweber3• 13 years ago

Honestly, they'll just drive 10 minutes out of the city to where land is cheap and parking plentiful.

rwhitman• 13 years ago

As others have mentioned the commercial possibilities of driverless taxis seem to be the biggest positive from this. The issues around the infrastructure to support driverless cars I think is a bit questionable. Eliminating traffic lights, self-aware parking spots etc sound a long way off, especially in poorer municipalities. I'm also really skeptical that the general public will adopt driverless cars the way they are expecting, I can definitely see the general populace rejecting them out of fear and frustration for a long time.

But in the case of taxis that are subject to city-wide mandates a bit of urban planning and infrastructure to facilitate an automated city-wide taxi network sounds like a realistic scenario and kind of exiting. And for other commercial applications as well, the efficiency advantages are obvious. Any business with a fleet of vehicles will suddenly get enormous cost savings in terms of fuel, salaries, and insurance premiums.

The biggest changes are that we will suddenly have a lot of old box trucks and taxis to deal with disposing of, and an entire workforce of drivers left unemployed.

elchief9• 13 years ago

I don't think you need any infrastructure changes for robo-taxis. You don't need to eliminate traffic lights, they understand them. You don't need to do anything with parking spots, the car can find its own, or pick up someone else.

gbadman• 13 years ago

[ROM][LineSkipper v3.0.1][Now fixes crash bug when joining line behind Audi's]

Although perhaps ridiculous at face value, I wonder how automobile manufacturers and legislators will prevent modders from tweaking driving algorithms to win the prisoner's dilemma of traffic.

Food for thought!

anemic• 13 years ago

This is the thing that scares me the most. If the self driving cars need to cooperate for maximum efficiency what if there are some cars that don't do it and exploit that?

valleyer• 13 years ago

Then at worst it’s just literally like the status quo?

aetherson3• 13 years ago

Lots of people jump to the notion that if driverless cars are available, we will go to a dominantly short-term-hire model of car ownership. By why?

Yes, taxis would be cheaper in a world of driverless cars. But they would still be dubiously clean (perhaps even dirtier without a human there to make the passengers clean up). You would still not be able to leave your crap in them. And they would still be only intermittently available at times of high demand (or else they'll be quite expensive).

In contrast, if you privately owned a car, it would have all its present advantages and also it would be usable even if you intended to get drunk; you could use the time that you were driving to read or use the computer or watch TV or whatever; you wouldn't need to circle around and try to park; you could still potentially utilize the car more than the present situation (for example: your car could drop the kids off at school while you get an hour of work in, and then come back and take you to the office), giving a cost savings.

By the way: does anyone who has kids young enough to require car-seats think that they could get away with a taxi-approach to cars, even if taxis were arbitrarily cheap? Don't underestimate the value of a personally owned car as a mobile receptacle of your stuff.

I don't know which of those models would be more dominant in a driverless car world. They both have advantages over the present state of the art. But I'm pretty sure that the people who jump immediately to believe that the taxi model would become massively dominant are basing this more on their wishes than the facts.

LockeWatts4• 13 years ago

I think there will be a hybrid model. Owning a driverless car will still be a very commonplace thing, car ownership is too ingrained in the American mindset to just let it go.

However, I believe owning a car will also come to be seen as an investment option, like owning property. What if your car was loaned out to a taxi service while you're at work every day?

The taxi service has no drivers, no cars, no real capital. It's just a website with a server coordinating cars to people and to destinations.

As a vehicle owner, you are given a share of the profits for the utilization of your capital. Sure there are a lot of kinks to work out, but I could see this being a very common thing.

karamazov• 13 years ago

Renting out your car while you're not using it negates the advantages of owning one that GP points out. In addition, you're now taking on the risk of damage and the onus of maintenance for a car that's used as a taxi. I don't think this will be a popular option.

warfangle3• 13 years ago

For taxis? Hybrid and gas?

.... Y'all don't think Elon would eat this up?

CBC4405• 13 years ago

The problem is that you'd have such a huge supply of available cars between 8-6pm M-F that you'd never be able to turn a profit if driverless cars became commonplace.

The parking lot at my office complex has more capacity than my city's entire public transit and taxi system combined. Releasing that into the market just means razor thin profits with the risk that someone will trash your car.

nemoniac• 13 years ago

Lots of people jump to the notion that if driverless cars are available, we will go to a dominantly short-term-hire model of car ownership. By why?

I'm already part of a short-term-hire model of car ownership for cars that I drive myself. I don't own a car and have no desire to own one but I use small electric cars from a company called car2go whenever I need them. If the cars were driverless I'd be even happier to use them.

I have no affiliation with the company, just as a very satisfied customer.

arbuge• 13 years ago

I can certainly see driverless cars leading to longer commutes all else being equal. If you can workout, read a book, work on your laptop, watch tv, etc. while your car drives you to work, you probably will care a bit less about the time involved. All else will not be equal however. Nothing in this scenario alleviates concerns relating to gas prices, which are likely to be the dominant consideration for most people. Your driverless car might be better at sipping gas than you, but not by much.

everyone3• 13 years ago

pls ignore!!<br/> noob<br/> testing<br/> whether html is allowed in HN comments

everyone3• 13 years ago

well damn your eyes! this is not relevant but how the dickens doesnt one insert a line break here??

harpastum• 13 years ago

You just have to add multiple returns.

Just put two hard returns, and the text will appear on the next line.

However, you are limited to one break at a time (e.g. you can't put 20 returns in a row to move 10" down the page)

trout• 13 years ago

I'm just hoping I'll be able to drink in a driverless car before I can use electronics in an airplane. If the same safety-at-all-costs model applies to driving these cars, they won't be nearly as fun as we dream.

Dewie5• 13 years ago

There is nothing I dislike more about big cities then the cars they are home to. Walking in the busy parts of town, waiting every 100 meters for my signal to pass, sometimes eight lanes wide roads, the never ending noise... I think how can people live right in the middle of this?

I welcome the day that driver-less cars make a mainstream entrance into my society, but it seems like this will just make the urban car drivers more indulgent in their car habits. "why take the subway, we can just drive right up to the avenue because parking is not a problem! We rule this land!" A very, very good taxi-like system, or very flexible car sharing might alleviate this.

cbhl• 13 years ago

I don't understand why anyone thinks that driverless cars will reshape existing cities -- it seems to me much more likely that they'll just shape how cities are built in the future. (Judging by the way modern-day suburbs are built, I suspect that it won't be for the better -- at least, not at first.)

Tloewald• 13 years ago

Driverless cars will increase miles driven, so let's hope they're efficient. Reduce the cost of something and people will use it more and find new uses of it -- and by far the largest cost of driving is the driver's attention.

pscheufele• 13 years ago

or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work

the future!

31reasons• 13 years ago

I would like to add some more interesting changes that will happen with driverless car (sounds familiar..um horseless carriage?)

You don’t need drivers license, so no more DMV lines.

Fewer parking lots means more parks,house and office space for people.

No more DUI

Car theft will go significantly down because there is no one to drive and steal it.

Car will be smaller and lighter because it will not need drivers seat and steering wheel and other driver related gears. This change will make cars more fuel efficient.

Less Pollution

More comfortable rides. The car will know when to gracefully slow down and speed up because it knows the "shake map" of the entire city at a very minute details. For example, it can remember in what area it experiences bumps and can slow down in those areas.

No road rage. All cars will be driven by machines so no need to show aggression.

By my rough estimate, 180 billion hours of time americans spend driving their car every year. These hours will become free to do basically anything. Another wave of Cognitive Surplus!

In car entertainment will mature to the level of in-home entertainment industry, because of more room and free time in the car.

In car office model will pop up. Professionals that rely on heavy traveling will prefer their offices right in their car.

archagon• 13 years ago

I don't know why people are expecting this to happen so soon (if at all). Even if we have the technology for driverless cars sometime in the next few decades (QAed for all possible conditions and failures, of course), there will be no way that they'll be street legal without a (sober) driver at the wheel. We have fully automated TRAINS -- vehicles that only have to go back and forth along a single axis -- that still require conductors. Airlines, despite being 99% automatic, are very, very strict about pilot safety and training. How could you possibly expect something that's an order of magnitude more complicated to be any different? Top it off with some of the most advanced AI (yet to be) invented and you have a problem with a solution much farther into the future than one might think. Me, I'd rather stick with good old fashioned public transit.

Flenser• 13 years ago

Reshaped by driverless car bombs...

"Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."

How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities

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