> Rather than people owning a car they'll request one via an app, it'll turn up and drive them where they want to be, and then it'll go off to the next customer. Car utilization will go up significantly. It'll be like all cars are taxis.
Traffic is quite bursty: there is a lot of generally unidirectional demand for trips during the morning rush hour, and then generally unidirectional demand in the opposite direction during the evening rush hour, and much less demand for anything in between.
Over a city they definitely do. Such as rush hours. Move the cars to the residential hours in the morning, move the cars to the schools & commercial areas in the afternoon & evenings.
I generally agree with all of these, however demand is not uniform which results in some vehicles having to be parked while they're not needed.
As another commented, it will be a very interesting optimization problem to figure out how to efficiently use the underutilized time of the fleet. There are a lot of things which are done at peak times now only because the owner of the car has to physically drive it there that could easily be moved to non-peak.
Wouldn't people still have to get to work during rush hours? I contend that it would be a smoother experience, but would it really be significantly less cars?
Given the phrase "rush hour" exists in the English language, I think they can only reduce congestion by sharing over the whole day if workplaces are successfully encouraged to shift their starting hours away from the usual 9-5 (or 9-5:30 as it seems to be). This will, of course, also work for human-driven cars.
I'm saying there are probably unexplored good solutions to that kind of congestion. Another I just thought of is the city motivating companies to make shifts not so centered around 9-5. Spread the rush with shifts of 8-4, 10-6, etc.
I'm pretty sure it would be easy to predict the spikes in usage. In the mornings people mostly want cars near their homes to take them to work. In the afternoon/evening they want cars near work to take them home.
Even without knowing this it's pretty obvious that if you have a large portion of users heading to one area (increasing the density of users in that area) they'll probably want to leave that area or move around it so you should have a higher density of cars in that area even if they aren't all being used.
Traffic is just cars times miles. If all your cars are parked far away from their final destination, all you are doing is adding total miles traveled. Those don't just have basic operation costs, but create yet another kind of traffic: Just like how an elementary school creates more traffic than a high school, because pickups and drop offs require more miles than just having the car parked in the right spots.
So instead of, say, having rush hour start at 4pm, with people leaving work, you have a new, free, bonus rush hour at 2, of empty cars driving near the places where they'll need to be picked up. Same thing near any other rush hour: Every added mile kills. It's not even just cars that have this problem: You'll find that in American cities with transit, which often are built with very few key destinations, there are large depots for trains downtown! Bart has no need to use most of their trains most of their day, so you'll find trains that just go downtown and stay there, parked.
What drives efficiency, always, is fewer miles traveled, and having the need for transport be as even as possible. Something like car-centric stadium is terrible: You need major infra to support a game, with many lanes, and many parking places, just to support game days. But then there might be as few as 10 game days a year, so all that extra infrastructure is wasted the other 355 days.
Self driving, rented cars probably make the first worse, and don't really make huge differences in the second. I think that they have advantages: fewer people dying from drunk driving, or someone doing 80mph in a city street running people over, like we had last week in St Louis. Younger people and older people retaining some independence in areas where now they are wholly dependent of others to go anywhere. But the efficiency gains story is a pipe dream. We will see more miles driven, and therefore more total congestion.
> Demand for cars is still huge during rush hours. Lots of cars sit idle during low demand times, but that capacity is still needed to meet high demand times.
That's a bit easier to solve. Congestion pricing along with economic incentives to employers who employee remote workers. Traffic is an externality; if you absolutely need workers on site somewhere in a dense urban area, you can do so, but you're going to pay for the privilege of all that infrastructure you're tying up.
The fleet would be sized to whatever was profitable. If people were willing to pay more at rush hour, there would be some capacity to capture that demand.
Thinking through what it costs me to own a car, I'm going to carefully do the math if they price my trip into the office at more than about $5 (it's a short drive). That's probably the bigger problem.
Rush hours are a thing... There shouldn't be such time if the demand was evenly spread, and that should be entirely possible after all nothing stops everyone from freely choosing their time of use of road when there is less users...
> Yes, obviously during “rush hour”, the public transport would be a lot more full, but often frequency is increased to compensate.
And during rush hour, the highways are a lot more full, and often capacity (number of lanes) is increased to compensate. If people didn't typically commute at the same time, then busses, trains, and car transport would all benefit from a reduction in required peak capacity. This is not in any way specific to cars.
Not all people commute. Rush hour isn't all at once, but distributed over several hours. Not all cars will be replaced right at the start, but those who use their cars the least will probably be the first to go taxi only.
Sure, but then you'd still need a large number of cars to handle peak hours, like 7 - 9 in the morning and 15 - 18 in the evening. You're not really freeing up the road if you're not reducing the number of cars.
Also, if there is an unused resource for most of the day, capitalism will find a use for it!
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