> Cars can park away from you and come back to pick you up. This should alleviate parking problems, and reduce parking-space-search based congestion on the street.
I know this sounds nice for just a moment, but if you consider it longer, it's awful. It won't decrease congestion, it will increase it. Why?
1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby. It's not as if every car will altruistically drive to a far-off area. Since self driving cars have more patience than humans, they'll be on the road much longer searching for their parking. It may be more efficient to keep the car circling the block, which is even worse.
2. Parking availability is a major inhibitor of car trips, especially in cities. This is a good thing. If it becomes easier to "park" (ie leave your car driving on the street or send it away), that will induce more car trips, and more car trips means more congestion, until there's a new equilibrium (maybe a 7-minute parking search is eliminated, but it's replaced with 7+ minutes of traffic).
3. Pick-up and drop-off in cities is already difficult with rideshare services. If all personal vehicles are doing it as well, they'll definitely congest the curb lanes more. This is definitely a more solvable problem than the first two, but still an annoyance.
And for what it's worth, the 4-hour commute may be a bit far fetched, but it's hard to deny that many wouldn't mind an extra 20 minutes of commute time in traffic if they can relax, nap, read, watch a show, etc. People will chose that option more, adding more trips and more congestion, until an equilibrium is reached. Maybe it won't be 4-hour commute times but it will be a major increase and added congestion.
All of these extra miles traveled searching for parking, and adding extra congestion, are disastrous to cities and neighborhoods. Sure, the fossil fuel emissions alone would be awful, but suppose (charitably) that all autonomous vehicles are electric, and assume that their electricity generation is emission free (unrealistic for decades). The weight of EV batteries will dramatically increase road wear and tear, and they'll increase the pollution due to rubber tires, which are already the major source of microplastic pollution. And of course, it's a dramatic waste of energy from the power grid. And all of this is ignoring that dedicating that much road space storing to idling and parked vehicles is a no-good, terrible, awful way to utilize public space in a city or neighborhood, when it could be used by some efficient public transit, parks, and safer infrastructure for personal vehicles when necessary.
Price the spots by location (or bid) and make their availability known through a web service. The parking trip is a straight shot and spot congestion is managed better than today. Another benefit of automating a manual process.
Sure, fair market pricing for parking via bidding would be amazing. Of course, there's decades of subsidies for parking built-in, but the price would still be much higher than you'd expect. (Check out "The High Cost of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup for a great overview of the huge public subsidy we already give cars, paid for by non-drivers).
You'd then need to price the time a vehicle spends on the road without an occupant. Otherwise you're just pushing people to send their cars around the block for an hour to avoid paying market rate for parking.
But it's hard to enforce the "unoccupied vehicle" rule, so it would be much better to just charge for all road use time in high congestion areas. Maybe... congestion pricing?
In many European and Asian cities this is a solved problem. You buy your own parking spot, lease one by year, or pay for the expensive hourly lots. Those are your only options.
Exactly. Which means drivers are getting a great discount thanks to the people who don't use a car, and the non-drivers are getting a markup on all the prices they pay. And the non-drivers were already paying a huge amount to maintain car infrastructure (at least in the US) because the gas tax doesn't nearly cover it.
Now don't get me wrong, I understand the value of a public good. Grocery stores receive food via trucks on roads, so even non-drivers get the benefit of the road. The parking subsidy, however, is insidious because it's so much less visible. It's not a government investing in a public good: the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone. It lets everybody believe that parking, and driving altogether, is much cheaper than it really is, because the (actually enormous) parking costs are hidden away and subsidized by those who don't use it.
>the city instead requires businesses to maintain off-street parking, and they pass that cost on to everyone
I'm not sure how generally true that is where I live relatively nearby (Boston/Cambridge). There are some businesses that have generally fairly crowded/small parking lots. (And places like hospitals certainly do though you generally have to pay for them.) But in general you have to pay for metered parking or find a garage.
Much of this depends on the particular city's rules and when development happened. Off-street parking requirements have become far more common since the 1950s. Places that developed prior to this (and didn't dramatically re-develop) may not have this as much, since the rules would only apply to new development. I think a fair bit of the US northeast may fall under that category.
However, plenty of other places in the US are different. The rest of the Bay Area is quite sprawled, as are the areas of the Midwest I've spent time in.
In San Fransisco, it's too "costly" to park on the street because your car will be broken into, with full support of the people of SF and law enforcement.
Not sure how many cities' economies can get get by just with their population buying locally, but if your parking is too expensive, I'm not visiting, and I'm not patronizing businesses. I don't actually know how sustainable a policy of "we don't accommodate visitors" is for a large city.
The entire point of a city is it to be a nexus of industry! Any place worthy of the name can get by just fine — the restaurants patronized by the locals, staffed by the locals, who have jobs in other locations. It’s not as if NYC needs your income (tourism accounts for about 7% of the economy). Not having a bunch of people clogging up the streets is a good policy.
Non drivers benefit because workers at the businesses they patronize don't have to pay for parking, delivery people don't have to pay for parking, visitors don't have to pay for parking, etc.
That's an argument that's pretty hard to justify. Most zoning rules with parking minimums attempt to meet peak demand for free parking. Subsidized free parking means that all the extra spaces are paid for by the business regardless of whether they're used. So the business (and thus the customer) is always overpaying for parking, compared to some hypothetical business with no free parking, but reimburses all market-rate parking for visitors and employees. Of course, that hypothetical business could only exist in a dense or very pedestrianized area, and not all businesses are suited to zero-parking.
The point I'd make is that mandating minimums of free parking is absurd: businesses and developers could instead decide how much parking they anticipate their business would need. They could come up with many creative solutions somewhere between the extremes of zero parking and plentiful free parking depending on the area. In most towns and cities across America, except for a few dense urban cores, we mandate one extreme and the result is higher prices for everyone (including the non-drivers, who get to help pay for all that unused parking as well).
> 1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby.
You're not thinking with an open mind.
If I own a robot car and I know I'm going to be at dinner for 2 hours, I will send the robot car to do a few Uber rides while I'm eating. Or it will go and charge. It doesn't have to just drive around in circles like a human. It can coordinate will all the other robot cars in the area and pick a place where it won't create traffic, or they can distribute traffic among each other. Maybe it can park-share, where if there are 3 cars and 2 parking spots, the 3 cars can coordinate and rotate who goes driving around.
Maybe robot cars will be fungible, so you don't own a specific robot car, but you own a time share, so all the cars are basically like Ubers, and you can call the one closest to you.
The possibilities are endless, don't think that a robot car will just emulate a human.
If I own a robot car and I know I am going to be at dinner for two hours, I will send the car someplace where no dirty person whom I have never met can possibly find or enter my car, because I am not a destitute person looking to monetize my own personal property. If you live in this world, bless your heart, but you are absolutely positively not allowed in my car and I suspect a fair number of people agree with me.
If all cars are Ubers I’ll just move to some other place that isn’t the ninth circle of rent seeking, sharing economy, dot com nightmare dystopia.
I mean, for sure there are some cool moonshot ideas. However I think it's pretty important to have some proof of concept or even a technical idea of how that would work before dismissing all of the concerns around congestion. Waving around "tech will save us" is really easy to do. (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)
You're right that I did predicate that little rant on the idea that the majority of AVs would be personally owned and not part of a fleet. I'm sure that car share will come into play to some degree, but I do think it's tough to convince people who are used to their car being a personal, (relatively) private space that they can store nearly for free on public roads, to give that up. It's especially hard to convince the automobile industry that the incredibly profitable 1-2 car per household model should be pushed aside in order to manufacture fewer, shared vehicles. Cruise (i.e. GM) will not cannibalize their personal car sale business: they're using this as a way to get test data to build personal AVs. Maybe car share will increase over time, but we're not about to witness some revolution, especially if it reduces consumption or profit.
> (Especially when the solution to congestion already exists and is criminally underfunded.)
I presume you mean mass transit, but that's disproven by induced demand: cars removed from the roads will be replaced by others, either drivers who were previously taking other forms of transportation or by new trips. Removing cars frees up capacity, which is effectively no different than new capacity from expanded roads.
I’m not sure why the idea that the cars will talk to each other is so “moonshot”. We have much more impressive pieces of infrastructure in place already. What might be moonshot is my proposal that it should be run by the US Postal Service.
I think it's a moonshot because it expects that we will have shared, open standards and protocols for all of this, which will either need to come from industry, or from regulators. Neither feels very likely. But then again, it could happen :)
They can't even get a standard way to cast your phone onto the screen in the car. It's just a fucking touch screen, and we can't figure that out because Apple and Google just can't let some portion of the money go and make their user's lives better. They have to have all the money or none of the money, and if they can't get all of it, then fuck you. Car manufacturers also won't even put in any sort of standards just so that I can upgrade the terrible stereo that comes in even the nicest of cars. God forbid they put a 2 cent RCA jack on the back of the stereo, maybe give you a read-only connection to the CAN-bus to display some data, and a rectangular hole in the dash (where the ugly ass screen is going to go anyways).
That won't happen. It sounds good, but the details kill it. Someone will trash your car and now it isn't acceptance when dinner is done. Someone will take a longer than expected trip and you won't have a ride when dinner is done.
Having a car come pick me up and take me to/from work would be great, and with no human to pay would be cheaper than owning a car for that purpose. But the family car packed with backpacks, jackets, sports gear, etc is gonna make owning at least one car per family that can afford it a reality for a long time. But self driving taxis will revolutionize how we get places and get stuff delivered, and ultimately for the better.
I think "coordinate with all the other robot cars in the area and pick a place where it won't create traffic" is pretty unlikely to happen. Tesla will do their own version of that which only negotiates with other Teslas, GM will do one that sends all cars to the wrong city, and Waymo will have their cars perform some optimal algorithm that is somehow incompatible with any human drivers they encounter.
Or, your car parks in the spot you yourself would park in, the ones building codes require the restaurant to provide.
No one wants their $60k+ self driving car casually risking accidents. And I certainly don't want to end my date night with drunk/messy Uber patron roulette for like $10 profit. Not hating if you do.. just not for me.
If there was already plentiful parking at your destination then the whole "cruising for parking" discussion is moot anyway, right? The concerns were about congested commutes to denser downtown areas where parking is difficult, or the date night into the city from the suburbs, etc. Difficult/expensive parking disincentivizes car trips there, and shifts them to public transit, ride share, and commuter rail, which are better suited for cities. If you weren't encountering difficulty finding street parking or paying steep garage prices, then of course you wouldn't suddenly be sending your AV on a joyride around town or letting random people use it as car share.
I know this sounds nice for just a moment, but if you consider it longer, it's awful. It won't decrease congestion, it will increase it. Why?
1. Cars will still be searching for parking: many people will prefer to have their car nearby. It's not as if every car will altruistically drive to a far-off area. Since self driving cars have more patience than humans, they'll be on the road much longer searching for their parking. It may be more efficient to keep the car circling the block, which is even worse.
2. Parking availability is a major inhibitor of car trips, especially in cities. This is a good thing. If it becomes easier to "park" (ie leave your car driving on the street or send it away), that will induce more car trips, and more car trips means more congestion, until there's a new equilibrium (maybe a 7-minute parking search is eliminated, but it's replaced with 7+ minutes of traffic).
3. Pick-up and drop-off in cities is already difficult with rideshare services. If all personal vehicles are doing it as well, they'll definitely congest the curb lanes more. This is definitely a more solvable problem than the first two, but still an annoyance.
And for what it's worth, the 4-hour commute may be a bit far fetched, but it's hard to deny that many wouldn't mind an extra 20 minutes of commute time in traffic if they can relax, nap, read, watch a show, etc. People will chose that option more, adding more trips and more congestion, until an equilibrium is reached. Maybe it won't be 4-hour commute times but it will be a major increase and added congestion.
All of these extra miles traveled searching for parking, and adding extra congestion, are disastrous to cities and neighborhoods. Sure, the fossil fuel emissions alone would be awful, but suppose (charitably) that all autonomous vehicles are electric, and assume that their electricity generation is emission free (unrealistic for decades). The weight of EV batteries will dramatically increase road wear and tear, and they'll increase the pollution due to rubber tires, which are already the major source of microplastic pollution. And of course, it's a dramatic waste of energy from the power grid. And all of this is ignoring that dedicating that much road space storing to idling and parked vehicles is a no-good, terrible, awful way to utilize public space in a city or neighborhood, when it could be used by some efficient public transit, parks, and safer infrastructure for personal vehicles when necessary.