Self-Driving Cars Are Still Cars–Which Means They Won't Improve Your Commute

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117943/googles-self-driving-cars-miss-problem-mobility-america

by ghosh • 12 years ago

22 77 12 years ago

newrepublic.com

inmyunix• 12 years ago

this guy is way off base. can't see the forest, etc.

personal, private transportation isn't going ANYWHERE.

Google isn't required, nor are they attempting, to reinvent propulsion mechanisms.

spullara• 12 years ago

The typical human driver, due to reflexes, follows the car in front of them with 2s of response time, Indepedent of speed. Therefore you can really only hope for 1800 cars/hour/lane under ideal conditions and at speeds where the length of the vehicle is a rounding error. Self driving cars could safely follow much closer, perhaps 0.5s of response time. This by itself could increase lane capacity by 4x without accounting for bad drivers getting into accidents or just disrupting the flow. Self driving cars are going to be amazing.

elchief• 12 years ago

Sure, the first driverless car doesn't really help other people. But there are network effects. The more driverless cars, the better everyone else is off.

1. Owning a driverless car and leaving it parked would be a waste of money. Either rent out your car as an Uber taxi, or simply don't own a car, and use a driverless one as a cheap taxi to work. Long-term, if everyone had a driverless car and used it like this it leads to an 80% reduction in the number of cars required. Isn't that good for the world? (minus GM shareholders). That's some major congestion relief.

2. A lot of congestion is due to drivers screwing up. Bad lane changes, driving too close to each other, idling, etc. Google cars would smooth this out.

3. Easy to send the driverless car to the supercharger station to fill up while you're at work.

4. We get driverless buses too, right? Meaning cheaper buses, meaning more quantity demanded.

The author is correct though, in that a lower cost of usership will lead to a higher quantity demanded.

Some of my previous comments here:

http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self-drivin...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6007977

SoftwareMaven4• 12 years ago

This misses the point, in many ways:

* Driverless cars means safer cars.

* Driverless cars means independence for people who otherwise are restricted (elderly, kids, blind, etc).

* Driverless cars are more fuel efficient. Sure, they aren't as efficient as not driving, but, just like driving with cruise control is better than not, complete automation will be better.

* Driverless cars will enable more productive use of the commute time.

There are probably many more benefits as well.

The one thing the author probably gets correct is that this will increase traffic load on the roads, and it is questionable whether it will increase efficiency of roadway usage more than it increases traffic load, but I'm guessing it won't. I can imagine a case where I have a single car, driving me to work, then going back to take my wife, then back to the house to pick up kids, then back to pick up my wife, and so on. In other words, a lot of empty drive time. This would be mitigated by a taxi-like "call the nearest car".

chrisBob• 12 years ago

Driverless cars will enable more productive use of the commute time.

This is the main reason I am interested. I love taking the train to work because I can pull out a book, or my iPad. The experience is 100 times better than the stress of traffic.

yitchelle• 12 years ago

So so true! Public transportation should be one of the infrastructure areas that the government need to support so that it is readily available and accessible, quick and frequent, clean and safe, and friendly to all family structures. Even if it is a loss making venture, the government needs to get behind it, just like the effort for the national defense program.

WalterBright3• 12 years ago

I'd rather take mass transit than drive through traffic. But in Seattle, taking the bus will take twice as long as driving. Some sort of rail system would be vastly superior.

The tube system in London, for example, is so quick and convenient I can't see the point of having a car there.

voicereasonish5• 12 years ago

Driverless cars means safer cars.

Where's the evidence for this?

perhaps if everyone on the road was in a driverless car, and they all communicated and prevented crashes. But that's not going to happen.

x43b• 12 years ago

"perhaps if everyone on the road was in a driverless car, and they all communicated and prevented crashes. But that's not going to happen."

I hear this sentiment a lot. Having a higher percentage of cars following safe practices is safer even if those are cars aren't perfect and even if 100% of the cars aren't automated.

Can you tell me the logic (I've seen it many times in posts) that there won't be any safety benefits until all cars are automated (or until there aren't any manual drivers?).

I disagree that the benefit will be that discrete.

antris2• 12 years ago

Lightning speed reflexes, inhuman car handling skills and inability to be distracted or get intoxicated go a long way.

emusan• 12 years ago

Some of the largest causes of accidents to my knowedge are all due to human error (ie drunk driving, texting while driving, speeding, blind spots, etc). This is all something that an automated system will eliminate entirely. For every one of these unsafe drivers you replace with an automated driver, you make the road safer.

(that said, I don't think it makes the car itself physically safer, that is up to the manufacturer)

rayiner4• 12 years ago

I think what bothers urbanists the most about self-driving cars isn't the fuel efficiency versus public transit. It's that they perpetuate the isolationism that's deeply embedded in American culture.

My parents grew up in Bangladesh, my mom in a fairly large city and my dad in a village. When they moved to the suburbs of D.C., the biggest culture shock they encountered was the intense isolation of American suburban life. Even in rural Bangladesh, you'll encounter dozens of people in a typical day. But in the U.S., you have to go out of your way (i.e. drive) to see other people. You can go days without seeing anyone outside your immediate family unit.

Self-driving cars address certain problems with a car-based society, like congestion and safety, but they perpetuate the model of driving around in little steel bubbles where we don't interact with or even see other people. That's the biggest difference between a car-based lifestyle and a transit-based lifestyle.

Brakenshire2• 12 years ago

That's true, but you get the same isolation with public transport - people do not chat on the London Underground, or on the commuter trains.

jesusmichael2• 12 years ago

a driverless car is called a bus...

fzltrp• 12 years ago

A bus will drive you on a fixed itinerary...

e40• 12 years ago

Add to the list:

* alleviates parking issues because the car can be told to go park somewhere 1) less congested and 2) less expensive.

One of the problems in cities is the complete lack of temporary parking being consumed by all-day workers, especially those with handicap placards who are not handicapped. 95% of the time I see someone getting out of a car and hanging up the placard they are not disabled (ie, not in a wheelchair or seem to have any handicap at all).

The lack of parking around businesses is a huge problem. Around my office, where there are lots of restaurants and other businesses, most of the parking is taken all day by handicap placard using commuters. This means there are fewer parking spaces for people to park and shop. That decreases sales in the shops in this area. Bad for everyone.

Basically, I won't even shop in areas of restricted parking availability. It's not worth the 30+ minutes of hunting for parking.

nextw33k• 12 years ago

The increased traffic load can be mitigated by smart routing of cars through multiple paths.

Plus they could be connected to each other to effectively tailgate each other. The first car can tell the following cars to break at the same time.

Cars in congested areas can notify others coming up to lower their speed to ease congestion.

mrweasel• 12 years ago

One question that interests me is what the self driving cars will do for congestion. One question I'm sure Google developers are asking is "What's the minimum safe distance between cars?".

If every single car is cruising at the same speed and distance between them, would our roads then be more or less congested? From the things I've read from German autobahn research seems to indicate that congestion should be less. On the other hand some roads here in Denmark seems to be design for less traffic that they currently carry and I doubt it would work if cars where forced to keep a fixed distance.

It would be interesting to get the reaction from the politicians, if some one like Google reported it's actually impossible to drive a certain road while following the recommended safety rules.

jstepka• 12 years ago

Driving is a frustrating experience. When you're a passenger that frustration is decreased by quite a bit -- I always get out of driving if I can. Not having to drive is a MAJOR improvement to anyone's commute.

Think about it, you've now gained X-minutes to and from work or where ever per day to focus on reading, chats, etc.

rayiner4• 12 years ago

A few years ago, I spent a month working out of my firm's SV office. Coming from Manhattan, it was quite a culture shock. Suburbia as far as the eye could see. But eventually I realized that people there chose to live that way. It wasn't just because they had kids and couldn't afford to live in the city anymore. Folks actually preferred their sprawling office park to a downtown skyscraper. Technology will be designed to enable that culture, and given the importance of Silicon Valley, probably spread it.

I still don't get it, but you can't say that Google isn't fulfilling a need. Its a catch-22: self driving cars are the right solution for America the way its designed now. And their adoption will entrench the design even more. The suburbs will get even sprawlier when people can commute an hour each way without actively driving. Its not what most futurists imagined that the world would look like, but it seems inevitable at this point. Urbanists can decry these trends, but who are we to judge people for living the way they want?

dmritard962• 12 years ago

i live in the city and take cabs regularly. the cost of cab drivers is actually a huge percentage of the cost of your cab ride[1]. Whether urban or suburban, lowering that is awesome for me. also, 25 mph max is perfectly fine in urban centers as things are so close and convenient.

1. http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-breakdown-of-where-taxi-far...

Daishiman3• 12 years ago

They won't be because energy costs are still going to increase unless there's some as-of-yet unknown development on engine efficiency.

The problem with suburbia is that its is a horrendously inefficient way to use resources in a planet that is getting more and more constrained by them. It is an unsustainable lifestyle.

Zigurd4• 12 years ago

Sorry, but the death of suburbs will have to wait.

Efficient, automated, probably electric, personalized transportation is going to enable my exurban lifestyle 45 minutes from Boston pretty much indefinitely. I'll have a lo-opex electric lawn mowing robot for my two acres of lawn, too.

colmvp• 12 years ago

As a dude with a physical disability, using a car is a godsend.

While living in cities like SF/NY, taking mass transit was a nightmare for me. Escalators were often not working. Elevators were either out of order, disgusting, or just plain slow. So I often just had to walk up stairs which was pretty painful for my shitty joints.

Then of course, there's stuff that affects most people. Some buses in downtown SF that just wouldn't show up. Or trains in NY which were packed to the brim on rush hour, extremely uncomfortable especially on summer days when specific cars don't have A/C. Or maybe shivering for half an hour in the station during winter. Or having to go uptown to go downtown because of construction. Or walking two miles between transfer points. Or maybe a subway line that just doesn't run during the weekend because fuck you.

What I went through is nothing like what people in war torn countries have to go through, so yeah, it's definitely first world problems and a lot of bitching. That being said, I'm so glad my years of work in SF and NY are over. Love the food and communities in those cities... plus biking in SF was helluvalot of a fun. That said, while it might not seem like a big deal, not having to climb several flights of stairs with bad joints or deal with transit uncertainty is a huge relief for me.

baddox2• 12 years ago

It doesn't take much creativity to imagine why people are attracted to suburbia, especially for raising families. Housing and land prices are generally lower, which means you get a bigger house and more room. More room is always better, all else being equal (at least until you get so much room that the maintenance cost blows up).

Combine that with the reduction in issues correlated with population density, like crime, pollution, traffic, noise, and homelessness, and it seems pretty obvious to me why a large portion of people will choose suburbia if given the chance.

It may be worth questioning what enables suburbia to exist as a feasible option, when it in many ways seems economically inefficient. One potential answer may be that government subsidy of roads leads to an inefficient allocation of resources.

rayiner4• 12 years ago

It doesn't take much creativity to imagine why people are attracted to suburbia, especially for raising families.

That's what I had always assumed--suburbia existed because people got older and had kids, and needed the extra space, schools, etc. Then I got to Menlo Park, and saw that even young single people with good incomes preferred to commute from a single-family home in a suburb to a sprawling tech office park in another suburb to living in the city. That blew my mind.

maxerickson• 12 years ago

They should at least reduce the number of housing locations where owning a car is necessary, which might get more people thinking about non car modes of transport. But that depends on how expensive they end up being to utilize on demand.

I think there are lots of people that believe they will need a car some of the time and end up doing their planning in the context of owning one. Cheap, on demand access can change that thought process.

nawitus• 12 years ago

visually, the comparison is comical.

That visual comparison is flawed. Just read the comments.

manicdee2• 12 years ago

http://the-riotact.com/the-muenster-photo-remade-in-canberra...

Here you go, the same size group of people and the vehicles required to transport them. 69 people: 1 bus, 69 bikes, 60 cars.

Doctor_Fegg2• 12 years ago

Nail. On. Head.

What does it matter if the guy in the front seat is twirling a steering wheel or not? His personal possession is still taking up a vast area of a public space - the city street. He's still driving 150 polluting miles for a meeting that could be held just as well electronically. He's still using way too much energy to transport just one person, whether the oil is burned in his car or in a power station somewhere else. And he's still sitting on his increasingly wide butt.

Google's self-driving cars will entrench one of the biggest problems with Western culture, not fix it. The answers are mass transit, active travel, smarter workplaces and better urban design, not the same old cars but with the ability to twirl the steering wheel themselves.

(and before the obvious rejoinder: I live in an English rural town with a population of 3,000. I don't own a car. It's possible right now; it'd be much, much easier if public transport and bike routes got the same investment lavished on motorists.)

harmegido• 12 years ago

I just don't understand these types of articles.

"Driverless cars don't cure cancer. They're a complete failure."

Would you prefer to have autonomous cars, with their reduced incidence of accident/ability to reduce traffic through smarter driving, or not? Who cares if it doesn't solve every one of the world's problems?

And I'm a person who actually hates cars/suburbia/etc.

jacques_chester• 12 years ago

"Driverless cars don't cure cancer. They're a complete failure."

It's called the Nirvana Fallacy. Very common in our profession and in others where folk like us wind up.

Doctor_Fegg2• 12 years ago

_If_ we could achieve largely car-free cities, and the few journeys for which cars are necessary were carried out by self-driving cars, then I'd agree with you.

But I don't see it. The seductive argument is "hey! Google's technology makes cars all right! We don't have to invest in public transport or bike lanes!". It's what's going on right now with electric cars here in the UK: the Government investment lavished on them is disproportionate to the pennies spent on cycle infrastructure.[1]

Self-driving cars are a great excuse for politicians not to make their cities as good as Groningen.[2] But maybe you're lucky enough to have better politicians than we do!

[1] https://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/cycling-gets-weak-mention-...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen#Transport

Zak• 12 years ago

His personal possession is still taking up a vast area of a public space

While true during the time the car is transporting a person, self-driving-cars-as-a-service requires fewer cars in total, and need not be parked near the destination (or at all during high-use periods).

Many US cities came in to existence or experienced major growth during the age of the car. They are built for people with cars, and would be quite difficult to convert to an effective public transit system. Consider Jacksonville, FL as an example. It has a population of less than a million and it's sixty miles wide. It wouldn't be terribly hard to make a strong case for building new cities differently, but causing Jacksonville to have a usable local rail system would be considerably more expensive than deploying self-driving cars there.

Bluestrike2• 12 years ago

Cars aren't going to simply disappear anytime soon. They're already entrenched, and they have been from almost the very beginning. What you're describing isn't so much an alternative as it is a wistful dream of a completely re-engineered human condition. And I say this as someone who loves to bike, has high hopes for future public transportation changes, and believes that we'll come to see many of the changes you're alluding to trickle into the world. Even then, the sort of revolution you're describing wouldn't be one that simply swaps out the car, but one that would necessitate changing everything from cities to suburbs to everything in between. Cities don't change overnight; they change over decades.

The implications of self-driving cars go well beyond simply cars "twirling the steering wheel themselves." From huge boosts in efficiency, to decreases in city congestion as people abandon the always exciting practice of circling the block for a parking space, to better traffic flow and decreases in traffic accidents to almost nil, self-driving cars are going to be revolutionary in ways that many can't even imagine.

What's more is that they won't be limited to just private vehicles. Autonomous taxis will combine door-to-door service with the Zipcar sharing model together and turn the current system on its head. The same goes for buses and even subways and trains, where the ability to run unimpeded 24/7 will make mass transit options that much more flexible and easier to expand. All of this while minimizing congestion on the roads.

notatoad• 12 years ago

assuming self-driving cars don't get road rage and try to cut people off, they absolutely will improve my commute[1]. the more emotionless drivers, the better.

[1]my theoretical commute. in reality, my commute is a ten minute bike ride along a riverbank.

baddox2• 12 years ago

They also probably won't follow bumper to bumper right into the middle of a busy intersection right before the light turns red, thus blocking most of the perdindicular road for its green duration. I see that every afternoon in SF financial district, and I can't imagine how many person-hours are wasted every day.

iamjdg• 12 years ago

Yes, this article is way off base, it will be referenced to years from now as a joke about how no one saw the trans-formative technology coming.

Don't get me wrong, nothing beats the "live where you work principle" in terms of efficiency. it should be the primary choice for professions that this is possible. this principle would also do wonders for the financial and ethnic diversity of neighborhoods instead of the tossed salad we have today.

Driver less cars will have a huge impact on efficiency and safety as they become the norm. someone already mentioned driving efficiency, but as the safety record of these vehicles sky rockets, cars will become lighter as they won't need to be designed such rare high speed collisions. This will also greatly improve efficiency and shrink the carbon footprint.

dmritard962• 12 years ago

awful article.

yes internal combustion engines are inefficient. yes mass transit offers superior energy consumption per passenger mile in many cases.

BUT

when cars are good enough at coordinating to make streetlights irrelevant, or park themselves, or self distribute among different routes to globally optimize road throughput, the carbon footprint will be substantially lower.

when the grid is cleaner which is happening every day, the point of electric cars being dirty is that much less valid.

cars are like packets. the cost per bit is higher, but the dynamacism compared to circuit switched systems is a GIANT feature. trains and buses lose their efficiency edge quickly as density lowers because of their inherent inflexibility.

even if my commute was to take the same amount of time, have the same carbon foot print and nothing else changed. The fact that I do something else besides play organ with my cars controls is a giant improvement. Maybe i will spend my new found free time coming up with explanations for why this luddite can't see the forest from the trees as @inmyunix astutely points out.

AND

the author is suggesting that limited reagent is roadways and that cars don't offer a solution to that. well, there are more creative solutions that can play nice with self driving cars, like time multiplexing roadways. a global system can decide that you may as well leave 20 minutes later because you will get there in the same amount of time and hence send a car to pick you up later. or more generally, just shifting the hours slightly so that instead of most commuters leaving at ~8 and ~5, its half ~7, ~4 and half ~8, ~5 etc. or even more granular.

These are difficult problems and there is no way a single solution should be expected to solve all problems. This is a step in the right direction, despite Ben Walsh's lack of vision.

AndrewDucker• 12 years ago

I wish people would think of these more as self-driving _taxis_. And thus, cheaper taxis.

Because most people that live in cities don't need a car all the time. An awful lot of people can use mass transit most of the time, and then a car occasionally. Turn that occasional car usage into a cheap self-driving taxi and you save on a lot of parking space.

logn• 12 years ago

The problem with mass transit is that you can't have a stop everywhere people are (and want to go) and even if you could you'd end up with a transit system that looks awfully similar to google's self-driving cars in practice.

Dewie• 12 years ago

Exactly. Self-driving cars could increase use of public transportation; order a car to pick you up and drive to the nearest bus/train/subway station. Ditch the car because it can take care to park itself/do whatever is next.

So if car-commuting is as terrible as the article thinks it is, and mass transit is more pleasant, it can help with that.

jesusmichael2• 12 years ago

driverless cars are such a dopey idea... money would be best spent to improve public transportation.

TheCoelacanth• 12 years ago

The money being spent of driverless cars is chump change compared to the amount that public transportation costs. It probably wouldn't even be enough to build a single light rail line.

adwf• 12 years ago

Seems like this guy can't see the forest for the trees. Does he really think that this technology isn't going to get applied to mass transit? Buses are an obvious next step, but making a driverless car is the relatively easy first step.

If we don't get started on the first step, we'll never solve the second, or the third or the thirtieth.

He complains that Manhattan would be better if it was pedestrianised... really? Does he think that they're going to knock down buildings and remove the roads just so we can all have a chat in the street? And has he ever been on mass transit like trains or subways? I dunno about the rest of the world, but I can guarantee there's almost no "valuable, often spontaneous social interaction" going on in London. You sit/stand quietly, generally in some discomfort due to overcrowding or tiny seats, maybe talk to a friend (if there) but probably not. They're anything but sociable.

There's always some complaint that you can raise about any future technology project, but sometimes you just have to get it done using what you have. Those dense pedestrian friendly cities in Europe didn't get that way by design, they just couldn't be knocked down to expand the roads for cars, so they made do with narrow roads. Likewise, US car friendly cities aren't going anywhere, deal with what you've got.

On another note, he seems to be ignoring the growing trend in renewable power sources around the world. There is a big push in Europe to switch to cleaner energy sources, thus making electric cars a great idea. eg. Combine the solar panels of the Tesla charging stations with automated cars that can drive in and charge while you're at work and you've got a revolution in how we get around.

Not to mention that there are countries like France that have 75% nuclear power, thus making the electric car almost emission-free from the very start.

6d0debc071• 12 years ago

Driving is a miserable experience inflicted upon 86 percent of us every morning and every afternoon, five days a week.

But you won't be the one driving. You won't have to deal with the stress of making those decisions and being constantly aware and hoping that some a-hole doesn't mess up and hurt you, or that you'll mess up and hurt someone else.

So, what's the problem meant to be?

The notion that hundreds of thousands of Google car pods will glide through cities in humming packs just inches apart is deeply naive. Almost every major city in the U.S. contains the rebuttal to that idea, in the form of new freeways that ere supposed to relieve congestion and improve commute times.

Very few demands are uncapped, and I've not seen any evidence that the demand for transport is so.

Self-Driving Cars Are Still Cars–Which Means They Won't Improve Your Commute

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