> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing".
Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple customers at once.
But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was an entire network of FSD vehicles.
> Ride-sharing is not an area that can be monopolized
It is very close. There are massive network effects and it will be hard to unseat an incumbent.
The more riders there are, the more revenue is available for the service provider (eg drivers). More riders means average waiting time is lower because more vehicles will be around. More riders means less downtime between riders since the next rider will be closer. More time in revenue service lets you spread fixed costs over more riders, reducing the fixed costs per ride (economies of scale).
This all means an incumbent will provide better service especially as reduced waiting times, and will be able to provide that service more cheaply due to greater utilisation. Their drivers/owners will also make more money due to greater utilisation. Newcomers will end up providing worse service (longer waiting times etc) and cost more!
> If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount).
What does the self-driving car change in that case? Wouldn't that be just the same as ordinary carpooling that we can do today?
> Think about it this way: if you already own a car, why would you use ridesharing?
To avoid traffic, to avoid parking problems, to avoid driving drunk, to avoid leaving your car unattended in a dubious neighborhood, to avoid parking costs, etc...
The availability of ridesharing lessens the need for car ownership, which is a huge win for cities because it reduces the need to devote space for the storage of automobiles.
The article ignores this benefit entirely, then makes the contradictory points that a) ridesharing apps actually increase traffic, and b) ridesharing apps siphon riders from public traffic.
All in all it’s written from the perspective of someone who hasn’t had to drive much in a high density urban area, where parking is nearly as much of a headache to figure out as traffic.
Don't. Cost isn't stopping people today from ridesharing. Carpooling won't become cool just because there is no driver, in fact I could see it becoming less cool as you will be much more alone with strangers. Many people today would be uncomfortable on a bus at night without a third party present (ie the driver, or at least many other strangers).
Think about all the extra traffic from autodriver cars doing jobs that today are too expensive. And the double-commute possibility. Your car takes you to work, drives itself home to park/recharge, then drives back to pick you up at the end of the day. Any 2-way trip could become 4-way, doubling the per-trip traffic. Or, rather than pay for parking while you shop downtown, you ask your car to drive around in circles until you are ready to go home.
> given that computers already are used to match passengers and route cars, I'm not clear on why we would expect a drastic increase
It depends on what the denominator is.
If it's only the time between when a driver/auto-car "accepts" the ride and the end of the ride, there's little reason [1] to expect a drastic increase.
However, if the denominator is the total time the driver is "on duty", which is, I believe, what is generally used to calculate rideshare drivers' effective hourly compensation, then my original point stands. That is, an auto-car can be "on duty" even while just sitting in storage.
The current algorithm also doesn't tell rideshare drivers where to be while on duty, only routing them once a ride is requested. In the auto-car scenario, the computer has complete control, so a predictive algorithm could increase utilization, even if the denominator is time-in-motion.
Whether any increase would be drastic is debatable, but there's opportunity for something.
[1] Currently, the computer routing algorithm has an incentive to optimize for time at the expense of distance (since it's the driver who bears the expense of the unbilled distance, AFAIK). In the case of an auto-car, that perverse incentive would be absent, but I don't expect the difference to be huge.
> Drives back empty to pick up parent to drive to work.
This implies there are no other people for which a rideshare would be suitable in either direction at any given time. This seems, like an unreasonable way to predict how mass AV would work. Again, demand is asymmetrical, which means there are opportunities for aggregation and overlap, when talking about mass adoption to the point that "the majority of cars on the road will have zero occupants".
There's the issue with demand for AV availability (ie traffic), which can never be reduced to zero. This would incentivize better judgement than "I'll stagger the school and work times"
Logically, why would AVs be 1-4 occupant vehicles? Once you have AV, you have AV vans and buses, similar to airport shuttling.
Presumably the car is going to pick someone up. That means it isn't parked being useless. If this starts working at scale, supply and demand will pull ridesharing costs down in a way that reduces ownership.
Those passengers would be in a car anyway. They don't stop going places. Like I said, ridesharing either reduces cars on the road or decreases the amount of parked cars for the same amount of people.
The biggest study was in SF and was inherently flawed by looking at traffic over years. It's obvious that an increasing population will generate more traffic, and Uber has allowed more people to travel than before. Serving more people isn't a bad thing, it's a natural situation that cities should plan for instead of being constantly surprised by.
I'm struck by how many times you refer to rather blunt instruments (e.g. "scheduling drivers in advance" / "blocks of time in which they need to drive" / "quotas to meet"). There is a much wider canvas of tools available to guide and shape behavior, as I would guess you understand. (You seem to use language like an economist or business analyst, so you likely know about various incentive structures.)
Given how cutting-edge and innovative the ride-sharing companies claim to be, I don't think they can also authentically claim that they cannot find smart, incentive-based ways to work within slight adjustments to the business and regulatory environment. Market-making and matching algorithms are powerful, interesting, and applicable here, in a wide variety of regulatory configurations. In my view, the "ride-sharing" companies (after all, the driver is "sharing" her car with the passenger... right!) should leverage their people and infrastructure as a competitive advantage and, well, innovate.
>> there's no network effect or immediacy required
If there's enough "shared trips"[1] , there's a network effect.And actually the lack of immediacy makes more shared trips combinations possible.That's on the customers side.
And on the drivers side - more drivers you'll get, more competition, but also more trucks that are spread through space and time - which would help in finding an optimal driver - with the shortest distance to the next job , and with the end point of that job closer to "home".
> It's not a simple push-button order
Why ?
[1]Or even close to share trips - drive from A to B , and from somewhere near-B to C .Also shared trips could be less-than-truckload and that's probably why they aim at small/medium business first.
> It’s well established that Uber and lyft INCREASE the amount of cars
>> Our findings provide evidence that after entering an urban area, ride-sharing services such as Uber significantly decrease traffic congestion time, congestion costs, and excessive fuel consumption. To further assess the robustness of the main results, we perform additional analyses including the use of alternative measures, instrumental variables, placebo tests, heterogeneous effects, and a relative time model with more granular data. We discuss a few plausible mechanisms to explain our findings as well as their implications for the platform-based sharing economy.
"The ridesharing space does not offer advantages to economies of scale" - efficiencies of scale in ridesharing are massive; more consumers means a more liquid marketplace and less downtime for drivers (idle time or time-in-transit to a passenger)and more drivers means shorter wait times and increased reliability in car availability. Beyond the improved consumer experience, there's real $ value creation resulting from these efficiencies that can lead to increased revenue/unit of time for drivers, decreased fares for passengers or increased commission for the ridesharing platform.
> Isn't a big part of the advantage of ride-share is that the vehicle is just there for your journey, you don't need to take care of it outside of that?
That's what I use it for. They're great for situations where I want to get somewhere that's 1-3 mi away and don't want to be responsible for the object I used for transportation once I get there (be it car, bike or scooter).
Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple customers at once.
But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was an entire network of FSD vehicles.
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