There's a fantastic amount of value in cities and urban areas. Self-driving cars can work as a massive network to reduce or eliminate congestion and give people back hundreds of millions of hours spent stuck in traffic.
They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they can significantly reduce energy consumption requirements for vehicle usage.
Not only that, AI will eliminate huge amounts of wasted road even during peak times and with traffic that can't be scheduled for off hours (like people going to work/school). A networked self-driving car can know where the traffic is and route around it. It can provide tools to everyone (from city planners to individuals) to maximize the availability of resources and minimize the time wasted on waiting. Red lights can cycle at the most efficient rate at all hours of the day, reversible lanes (like many large cities have on their primary highways) can be closed and opened on a dynamic schedule rather than on the preset schedule. When all cars are AI-driven and aware of all other cars, they can drive at exactly the right speed, allowing faster merges and exits, etc. Humans are wildly variable in their response time and unpredictable in their behavior in so many situations on the road, that replacing them seems likely to increase the capacity of roads by a dramatic amount. Maybe doubling? Maybe tripling? I don't know, but it will be a huge difference.
I think self-driving cars could more than double road capacity, and almost eliminate congestion. There are so many exciting permutations.
Major causes of congestion could be almost entirely eliminated (breakdowns and accidents)
Vehicles could be routed more efficiently, and dynamic road tolls used to keep traffic flowing on popular routes.
On-street parking could be eliminated, as fewer people will own their own cars, or their cars will be able to park themselves elsewhere.
Meanwhile the absence of human drivers (and exhaust emissions, once we move to all-electric vehicles) will see a step-change in the take-up of cycling and walking in urban centres.
This is just scraping the surface. Self-driving cars are going to change everything.
Besides the obvious alternatives in cities, having more efficient cars (i.e., self-driving cars that can algorithmically ease congestion and find efficient ways to carpool) would be a big step forward. Take a drive on any American highway and you'll see the amount of cars with a single occupant is overwhelming -- what a waste!
This could work incredibly well especially in urban areas. At least here in Europe, more and more cities are experimenting with traffic limitations in the inner city core, but this also has big drawbacks. Coupled with a cheap self-driving electric cars service, on the other hand...
But self-driving cars will enable a sort of ad-hoc, on demand carpooling style 'mass' transit: something like ten-passenger vans that deliver commuters from similar downtown areas to similar home neighborhoods. If only ten percent of commuters switched to that method, taking ten cars off the road and replacing it with one van, the volume of traffic drops immediately to 91% of what it was. That alone, plus significantly smarter, denser, more efficient, networked AI driving, will hugely reduce gridlock.
And at some point as more jobs get automated, and the jobs that remain human-accessible become more knowledge-based and less presence- and specific time-based, we'll move away from the huge spikes in traffic at 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., spreading traffic volumes more evenly out across the day.
I'm pretty sure self-driving cars will make traffic better, because it has been shown that most traffic jams are caused by and exacerbated by poor driving habits.
I am not sure self-driving cars will reduce traffic. My expectation is that they will increase traffic. By a lot probably. And commutes will get even longer.
Yep, if we can get self driving cars and people are actually willing to share that space with strangers it will be a big win for transportation efficiency.
However at the same time we should be investing in density and figuring out ways to make that work. Urban sprawl is massively innefficient by it's nature.
Self-driving cars don't necessarily help. Really, it's more a routing problem. Buses with human drivers would probably be fine if you could come up with a working system to route them on demand. Self-driving might save money in the long run, but cars are probably not as efficient as buses in a big city.
Self driving cars take way more space than equivalent mass transit. Even assuming that self driving cars double road capacity, highways have much lower capacity than mass transit. There are advantages to self driving cars to be sure, and they will change the transportation game, but I predict they will not fundamentally alter the city vs. suburb equation.
For starters, it is highly unlikely the urban planning mistakes of the 60s where downtowns were flattened with freeways will be repeated. We're already seeing cities tear down or bury existing freeways to correct these mistakes. Cities from LA to Atlanta are investing in mass transit and are working on getting more walkable and dense.
I predict that self driving cars will actually be a big boon for cities themselves as it would now be easier for city dwellers to visit transit inaccessible destinations or shopping trips that require a car. Zipcar, Car2Go, Enterprise's car rental club and the like are already bridging the gap, but self driving cars would help those who can't drive such as children or the elderly or even those who never learned to drive.
Self driving cars in areas with poor public transport will likely make things worse. Self driving cars in areas with good public transport combined with apps that schedule combination routes, and fleet management that makes better decisions about driving patterns, could be a big benefit.
E.g. the minicab and Uber drivers around mine are often more clueless than I am about traffic patterns nearby, despite the fact I don't drive myself. Realtime coordination to pick less congested routes dynamically could improve things a lot.
And apps like Citymapper that don't just suggest a single mode of transport has a lot of potential. In London they're experimenting with bus routes of their own. The long term potential is being able to promise you short waits and low cost by e.g. telling you to wait for the bus when the bus is near, but sending a car - rideshare or not - if there's a wait, and dynamically scheduling minibuses for high traffic routes not covered by the standard routes, for example.
I'd prefer that over a car the whole way a lot of the time, because living somewhere highly urban, driving the whole way can almost never compete on speed, but figuring out the optimal route that keeps changes few and waits low is often tricky. E.g. Citymapper just recently introduced me to a route I had no idea was an option - a station I've never used before because it's too far too walk and awkward to get to by bus, and so I didn't even know what trains go from there. But suggesting an Uber there and train from there, and a second change got me where I wanted to go ~20 minutes faster with the same number of changes as if I'd gone the route I expected to take. Mixing and matching like that has the potential to make taking a car the whole way a lot less attractive for a lot of routes where people do opt for that today.
But it does require a lot of things to go right. For starters, multi-mode transport apps that are free to pick the optimal mix needs to win the battle for being consumers first choice in planning trips.
But people also shouldn't waste so much time of their life stuff in traffic driving vehicles either. I mean, the ideal city would probably be self-driving trains, people movers, and free scooters, segways, or wheelchairs everywhere. No AI vision systems needed.
If you live in urban Japan, do you ever need a car?
To replace all 273 million vehicles in the US with self-driving EVs would cost around $10 trillion @ $50k per car. You could built a national network of self-driving lanes for a fraction of that. You could build rail lines and subways in every major metro area.
The major upside of a car vs train though is privacy. You may not mind taking the train in Japan, but in SF, it can be disgusting, and so private vehicles and American culture may be inseparable.
But that still leaves many other solutions, like we have bike lanes, and HOV lanes, we could build AV-only lanes, and prohibit AVs from working (requiring manual takeover) when you depart them.
On long drives to work, you'd just stay in the AV lane and chill, and when you got close to an exit, you'd have to take over. It would still be a win if on a 1hr commute you only did 15 minutes of actual driving.
Self driving cars solve the last mile problem. You get off a train close to your destination and a cheap self driving taxi finishes the journey.
And you could replace the train with a self driving bus. It can carry multiple people efficiently for the majority of their journey. And unlike current buses or trains, it can automatically adapt it's route based on where the occupants want to go. The buses can cooperate with the taxis to bring people to and from convenient pick up points.
The main problem with gridlock is that there is no limit to the number of vehicles on the road. There needs to be an economic advantage to things like buses that transport multiple people. A high tax on using the road in the city might work, if it could be enforced.
It would help significantly by reducing congestion because people can go directly to their destination instead of going into and out of parking lots, which tend to be clustered and add significant traffic to the city.
On top of that people won't need to start and end at the same time with self driving cars, as you have the ability to sleep/read/do work during the commute.
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.
This is _exactly_ the use case I think self-driving cars are perfect for: a shared fleet of cars continuously picking up and dropping off passengers within cities – eliminating the need for parking and allowing cities to reclaim that ROW for other uses (bigger sidewalks, bikeways, parklets/seating, or even dedicated bus lanes and light rail for high capacity routes, maybe even housing in some spots), finally allowing vehicles to become a crucial supplement to higher capacity public transportation rather than a competitor to it, and hopefully decrease the amount of space dedicated to cars (think highways and sprawl in addition to parking) within cities.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlo...
They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they can significantly reduce energy consumption requirements for vehicle usage.
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