Ninety5rpm

Just watch what happens in Phoenix. I think the popularity of AV taxis will address of the issues you raise. There will be plenty for them to be economical even in semi-rural and rural areas. Yeah, in some remote corner of Alaska it won't work, but most places in the US have people moving around pretty often. That's enough. Even today with Uber and Lyft you usually don't have to wait long. With AVs the idle time cost is near zero so they can afford to have a large enough supply of cars so one is already nearby and ready to pick you up on a moments notice. The high convenience and low cost is what will entice people to not drive their own cars. You'll see.

Maelochs

I am not convinced but I am just bright enough to understand that that doesn't mean i am right. We will see where Phoenix and other cities are in a couple years.

Saale

I think this is an incorrect line of thought. The big selling point of autonomous car sharing is that a single person won't have to cover all the associated costs anymore, they're spread across many users, and that ultimately you will need fewer cars in total for the same number of people, with each car covering a greater distance because it's more frequently used than a privately owned car. The bottom line is lower costs. And as we all well know, with lower costs comes increased usage. A fifth of the cars covering five times the average distance each still equal the same traffic as before, and with lower costs people will actually use cars more instead of less. Overall this whole thing will therefore increase traffic.

And either way, even with autonomous car-sharing you'd still have to design cities around cars and you'll have contributed absolutely NOTHING to making them more walkable and more liveable. Different cars do not solve car problems. The only way you're going to change urban planning is if you limit usage of ANY type of car.

prathmann

You may well be correct that AVs do not decrease, and may even increase, traffic levels. But much of the real estate of our urban/suburban areas is devoted to storing cars (i.e. parking) rather than travel. In my neighborhood each house has room for three cars inside the garage, another three on the driveway, and a few more at the curb in front of the house. In the city there are huge parking lots and garages dedicated to car storage. With AVs I'd anticipate that the vehicles not currently needed would reside just outside the metro area thereby freeing up large amounts of urban and suburban space. Urban and suburban planning could then become higher density to improve the walkable and liveable indexes.

Saale

I sure hope this'll be the case. I know the parking lot coverage is spectacular in some US cities, but over here it's not nearly as bad, and I preceive traffic noise (as as well as air pollution for now) to be a more pressing issue. Fewer cars per household and more underground parking in cities, but they still manage to produce enormous amounts of traffic. And to be honest two lanes of heavy traffic in each direction aren't much quieter than four lanes of heavy traffic in each direction.

mr_bill

OR

The AVs will be able to park in existing levels of huge parking lots and garages dedicated to car storage. You'll be able to fit MANY more AVs in the existing levels of huge parking lots and garages dedicated to car storage because they'll be able to park cm's apart from one another. (No need to leave space for humans to get into and out of the vehicles, no need to leave space for humans to walk from their vehicles to the exits. The vehicle drops off and picks up the humans at the boarding area, and then self-parks.) AVs can be parked tail to tail many deep, and if one in the middle needs to move, the AVs will shuffle around and then repark. (Currently done by humans in many urban parking lots.)

So, how will urban parking lots and garages be repurposed? Into lovely parks? Or into parking lots and garages that CAN STORE MORE VEHICLES?

-mr. bill

Maelochs

A whole string of thoughtful, thought-provoking posts. I express my (not sarcastic, this time) gratitude.

I-Like-To-Bike

Who are you responding to? Who is posting anything about "the simple life idea" on this list but you?

Suggest that you post this tirade on the LCF list where it belongs and is catnip for that crowd.

Self driving cars have nothing to do with the so-called "simple life idea"espoused on the LCF list

Ninety5rpm

"A fifth of the cars covering five times the average distance each still equal the same traffic as before..."

That's true but it doesn't account for reduced traffic due to ride sharing.

Currently, work trips average 1.1 occupants per vehicle (well, that was from 2001 but I know of no reason to think it's much different today).

If the average number of occupants per car increases to even 1.8, let alone, say, 5.5 (in shared mini vans or buses), then you'll have less traffic, or much less traffic, even if people are traveling more than before due to the lower shared costs.

Ninety5rpm

The space will be converted to residential, retail, office, industrial uses... - resulting in denser living, which bodes well for cycling. It's all good.

Maelochs

Tandempower will plant trees in all the parking lots.

I-Like-To-Bike

Tandempower doesn't post on this list, suggest you restrict comments about him or his posts to the threads and lists where he does post his thoughts.

Maelochs

Why? Henry David Thoreau doesn't post on this list. So we should never mention his name? Henry Ford doesn't post here .... nor any of his progeny? The guy "Urmson" who narrates Ninety5rpm's holy video doesn't post here. We cannot mention him either?

The fact that we all know what I said pretty much means it is a valid reference.

mr_bill

It's not all good. It's mixed.


Look, while past performance is no guarantee of future results, even in your dreams, where parking lots become office buildings, we *CAN* look at what has ACTUALLY happened.


Take an office campus, let's say, on the outskirts of San Diego.

Replace a couple of parking lots with a multistory parking garage, and replace the other parking lots with multistory office towers.

What happened (past tense, this isn't hypothetical) to the automobile traffic to that office campus?

Right, it went up. WAY UP.

Compare the people biking to that campus before the change and after the change. What happened (past tense, this isn't hypothetical) to the bicycle traffic to that office campus?

Yes, there are now a few more people biking to that campus, but the ratio of employees biking to that office campus/employees at office campus is essentially unchanged.

What IS changed is every one of those people on bikes are LESS HAPPY about riding around with so much motor vehicle traffic.

-mr. bill

Ninety5rpm

I don't get how this helps us predict the effect AVs will have.

Maelochs

yes ... and that is sad.

Ninety5rpm

Here's the change MrB is talking about:

That's just a shift of, and increase in, parking space usage (from lots to even more garage space) and commensurate increase in density (use of previous lot space) and thus more usage, more people working within the area, and, with no change to how they get there, more vehicle traffic (duh).

That's not what AVs will do. Where is the connection?

mr_bill

Just to make the math easy for you.


Assume there is a three story parking garage.
It stores x conventional cars per floor, for a total of x+x+x = 3x cars.

Re-purpose ONE floor of that parking garage to store 4x autonomous cars, the parking garage now stores x+x+4x = 6x cars, 6x/3x = 2, double what it stored before.

Re-purpose an additional floor of that parking garage, x+4x+4x = 9x cars, triple what it stored before.

-mr. bill

mr_bill

Accessing the Long-term Effects of Autonomous Vehicles: A Speculative Approach

-mr. bill

Ninety5rpm

I think you're talking about privately-owned AVs. I don't think that's the direction we're going, certainly not initially, and probably not at all to any significant degree.

Ninety5rpm

Here's what he says about Scenario 3 (AVs are ride shared rather than privately owned):

While vehicle sharing reduces the number of cars in the region, it also leads to
higher utilization of cars and thus more trips per car per day. Overall, it can be expected that traffic volumes and VKT
are going to increase compared with the current state, due to rebalancing trips and new behaviors. Benefits could result
from parameters not modeled here—e.g., newer vehicles on the road, increased fuel efficiency of AVs, and more
appropriate vehicle choices for different uses

I think when he says "vehicle sharing" he means serial sharing (I use it, then you use it) rather than simultaneous sharing (we use it together; pooling).

Where's Scenario 4? That's where AVs are shared and pooled.

mr_bill

So lets assume we are all going to be taking a shared pool vehicle to and from work.

Currently, for every 10 trips into the hypothetical San Diego office campus in the morning, 11 workers arrive, and the 10 vehicles are stored there for the day.

You stated that ride sharing would increase that so that every 10 vehicles will bring 18 workers, but that the vehicles will not be stored there.

If the shared AVs are not *STORED* on site, where do they go? Elsewhere.

So that's now 20 trips in the morning (the trip that actually does something, and the emtpy re-balancing trip leaving the office campus) bringing 18 workers, or less than 1 worker per trip. That's "more traffic."

Currently, those 11 workers get into 10 vehicles to go home. 10 trips, 11 workers home.

Now, everyone is ready to go home. Where will these automated vehicles come from? Elsewhere.

So, 20 trips to bring 18 workers home. That's "more traffic."


Oh, what about the empty parking garages?

Well, they actually won't be empty parking garages, they'll be vehicle buffer garages, FIFO queues.

Similar to taxi stands near hotels, they will have to re-balance the vehicles in order to deliver the quality of service at quitting time. Google might have it's own buffer floor, Uber another, Airbnb a third. (Similar to Hertz, Avis, and National at major airports.)

How big will that buffer need to be? It depends. How bad is the self-driving vehicle traffic that they are stuck in?


So, correcting your math, you'll need to have an average pool size of 2.2 people *JUST* *TO* *KEEP* traffic constant.

To halve the traffic, you'll need an average pool size of 4.4 people.


Because taking a trip in AVs will be so cheap that people will want to pool?

-mr. bill

Maelochs

Let's save the city of phoenix a ton of money ad tell them we have it all figured out. Whoever calls first gets to tell his or her version---either it will be e total flop, the cars will run amok and kill everyday, traffic will increase drastically, or Phoenix will suddenly become heaven for anyone who doesn't want to stay at home.

We could wait and see how it actually works out ... but it seems to me every city will have different experiences, and every subsequent city will modify its plans according to what was learned form those other cities, and many of those plans will have to be modified because every city is different, and then urban planners and traffic flow engineers will start changing their plans to accommodate the reality of AVs, which reality will already be different by the time those plans are actually realized.

Better still ... . flying cars are impossible with human pilots ... but once AV is much improved, AV helicabs will be a real possibility. Then cyclists will have to worry about getting hit from three dimensions.

Ninety5rpm

That's not apples to apples.


Currently, for every 10 trips into the hypothetical San Diego office campus in the morning, 11 workers arrive, and the 10 vehicles are stored there for the day.

With pooled AV vans or mini buses, it would take 2 trips to bring in those same 11 workers.

That's far less traffic, even adding 2 more trips for those AVs to go to their next stop, likely occupied by people to be dropped off at some other destination, by the way.

Maelochs

Now we are doing imaginary math with imaginary statistics about imaginary riders in imaginary cars, going to imaginary office buildings an imaginary number of times per week ... to prove a point in Reality? You guys are first-rate comedians.

No one knows how it will work---or if it will work.

AVs are coming. How they will be used, no one knows. Considering that just in America there are over 300 million people in fifty states on this huge continent ... I kind of think different things will work in different places. And people will always be thinking up new things ... all the sticking points any of us can imagine ... there will be different ones. And people will think of ways past those too.

Air cabs, drone delivery, who knows? AV rickshaw trikes ... or human operated electric-powered rickshaw trikes? Who knows? Just like now ... some areas have neither buses, Uber, Lyft, nor cab service ... some places have really expensive ride-shares and cabs and crappy busses. Some places have trains, cab, busses, minivans, and ride-shares.

In a several countries I have visited, people of a certain income level would ride commercial vans ... oversized vans that were not really quick or really comfortable, sort of owner-operator businesses, to provide access to places where the buses didn't run. That same owner-operator could instead have two AV vans and run the whole deal from a laptop in his kitchen.

We have no idea what people will come up with.

But judging by The Whole of History ....

Can you imagine a bunch of stable owners in Detroit sitting around after dusk on a Friday night in about 1901, sharing a bottle and swapping stories, and laughing about that idiot who was converting his stable into a garage for those crazy "automobile' things .... yeah, they refused to believe, too.

Many horses in Detroit nowadays?