Slashdot Mirror
Will Robot Cabs Unjam the Streets?
An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a story with some video of a traffic simulator showing just how the roads can be jammed up by people looking for a place to park. (You can play with the simulator too.) This has been suspected for a long time by many traffic researchers and city planners, but the simulator shows just how quickly the roads jam up after just a few of the blocks fill up with parked cars. The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride. They could change city life forever.
>> autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride
I'm hoping "autonomous cars != end of personal car ownership." I still like to have my own passenger compartment that no one else has eaten in, thrown up in, etc. that I can maintain to my own standard of hygiene.
A lot of people are complaining that they do not like the idea of sharing vehicles.
What about thinking about it this way - suddenly proximity of your parking spot to where you are is a lot less important. Your personal autonomous vehicle drops you off at your destination and then goes to find a parking spot. Then, when your waiter brings you the check (for example), you let your vehicle know to come pick you up in ten minutes. The vehicle checks current traffic levels and leaves for a just-in-time pickup.
Before you go to bed you let your autonomous vehicle know what time you want to get to work. Your vehicle looks at the average commute time for that time of day and lets you know when it will pick you up. It leaves its parking spot with enough time to get you.
The drawback to this that you are spending money to pay for gas or electricity while your vehicle drives (empty) to a parking spot. I would say this is the price you pay for wanting your own vehicle. The alternative is a taxi-style service.
For everyone complaining that other people will make the car unusable, you might not have taken a cab recently. More often than not it seems like you are video recorded. In addition, the cab company (which I assume would be the same ones putting autonomous cabs on the street) would have a vested interest in keeping vehicles clean.
I used ZipCar for several years and reporting damage or a messy car was easy for the company to follow up on. The previous user had to have reserved the vehicle and paid for its use. The company has credit card on file already, it is easy enough to go after the user for damages.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
In case you missed it this was a hitchbot reference.
4) The untended vehicles that show up get vandalized, stripped, and left a hulk of it's former glory.
The added benefit for the thieves is the cars come when summoned.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
There is a way to make it happen, but I doubt it will fly. Korea basically did this in the 1970s and 1980s. The government knew it didn't have the road infrastructure to support every household owning a car, so they taxed cars up the wazoo. A car that might cost $10,000 would cost $50,000 after taxes ($100,000 in today's dollars). This had the effect of severely discouraging car ownership. In its place, a robust taxi industry sprang up. I remember visiting downtown Seoul and 80%-90% of the cars on the road were taxis. There were no traffic jams, and if you didn't want to wait for a bus you could hail a taxi within 15-30 seconds.
It all fell apart in 1988. One of the Democratic nominees for President (Gephardt if I remember), in a bid to win Michigan made a huge ruckus about how Hyundai was allowed to sell its cars for $6000 in the U.S., while an equivalent Ford cost $45,000 in Korea. He conveniently left out that the same Hyundai also cost $45,000 in Korea. He didn't win the nomination, but the damage was done. U.S. public sentiment forced the U.S. to pressure Korea to remove their car taxes. Cars in Korea suddenly became affordable to the average household, and Korea plummeted into two decades of gridlock.
Do you mean build so much parking that there's never a shortage when the price is zero? That's actually a very bad idea, because the economically optimal number of parking spaces is the number where MR=MC. This means wherever the cost of providing a parking space is not zero, the lost revenue from not providing it should also be nonzero. In other words, in an unpriced parking lot, it's financially optimal for it to get filled up completely at times. For a very similar reason, if you never miss a flight, you're spending too much time at the airport.
No, rather than micromanaging the number of parking spaces, it's better to decide what is the problem you're trying to solve, and give the businesses freedom to decide how to solve it. Is the problem that their parking lots are filling up completely? Then simply require that their parking lots never fill up completely.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Traffic studies/simulations have repeatedly shown that most traffic problems originate from a single car causing a chain reaction which amplifies. You would need a significant portion of the system automated to compensate for that. Either to avoid those problems in the first place or to compensate once the problem has occurred.
here's a counter counter example: It takes 1 hour for me to take the train into the city. It takes 2.5 hours to drive into the city. The cost of parking in the city for the day is double the price of the train ticket. But that is irrelevant, the time difference alone seals the deal for the train.