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Will Self-Driving Cars Clog Our Highways? (go.com)
An anonymous reader writes: While self-driving cars may be safer and cheaper, the Associated Press warns they could also create massive traffic congestion. "The problem, say transportation researchers, is that people will use them too much." One auto industry expert predicts that self-driving cars will increase travel by those over 65, as well as those between 16 and 24, resulting in at least 2 trillion extra miles being driven each year. In addition, "Airlines also may face new competition as people choose to travel by car at speeds well over 100 mph between cities a few hundred miles apart instead of flying," and faster commute times could mean more urban sprawl as workers may spread into cheaper neighborhoods that are further from the city center.
Yes!
People may well do a lot of things and so what? It wasn't that long ago we didn't have airlines ffs.
Sounds like all good things to me. I certainly plan on travelling more once I get a self-driving car. I'm not a good long-distance driver, so this new technology opens doors for me.
1. While self-driving cars may be safer and cheaper
A: Self-driving cars are nowhere near cheaper at the moment.
2. the Associated Press warns they could also create massive traffic congestion. "The problem, say transportation researchers, is that people will use them too much." One auto industry expert predicts that self-driving cars will increase travel by those over 65, as well as those between 16 and 24, resulting in at least 2 trillion extra miles being driven each year.
A: in such case, self-driving cars would also create massive demand on the oil industry and push prices at the pump even higher, reducing the problem to the current levels of traffic congestion. Also, self-driving cars wouldn't drive like the idiots who are causing the congestions right now.
3. In addition, "Airlines also may face new competition as people choose to travel by car at speeds well over 100 mph between cities a few hundred miles apart instead of flying," and faster commute times could mean more urban sprawl as workers may spread into cheaper neighborhoods that are further from the city center.
A: same as number 2, just because you have a self-driving car won't make it magically cheaper to drive somewhere. And unless we change laws, nobody's going to be legally driving at 100 mph between cities any time soon. Not with the "quality" of our current highways.
The taxi / mini bus idea will also do the same with a high number of them needing to go and force from some depot before / after rush hour.
Traffic will be worse than ever
Acccident rates will go up
Urban sprawl will not happen
Better lobby some more
Eventually oil will start running out, sometime in the next few years, the price will go up and will encourage people to travel less, problem solved.
Electric cars will not have a big impact either since standards of living and incomes will also drop with less oil available, reducing all modes of travel.
Any news headline posing as a question can commonly amnswered with 'no', because they're just attention grabbers.
Is it a surprise that when you invent a good thing, people will want to use it? You might as well say that if you invent smart phones, then cell networks will be hopelessly congested. Of course they will, which will create pressures to build out new networks.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Imagine the throuhput with only autonomous vehicles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SmJP8TdWTU
Not only intersections, but also less space between vehicles. It can be practically a car-train.
Either a joke article or this is one of those attempts to appear impartial while looking idiotic. Next up, will encryption make us bad at math?
With the advent of self-driving vehicles, we also are embracing enhanced congestion avoidance. When we worry about an extra volume of vehicles on the roadways we must also take into account advanced congestion avoidance routing helping to mitigate that impact. I'm not suggesting that it's a non-issue, but we may not know the true effect for now. The real problems would come from inaccurate road mapping data causing poor route planning. Also, nobody looks forward to their suburb turned into a secondary thoroughfare that suddenly all the non-residents would use.
meh, I should just stop reading this website with so much crap like this lately
Clickbait title after clickbait title. Look, cars will not be going 100 mph because it's extremely inefficient.
We'll all be playing virtual reality games on the way there, so if it takes a few extra hours... nobody will care. Or gasp, more likely if Trump becomes president we'll all be working 24/7 for our new dictator.
Will Robot Cars Drive Traffic Congestion off a Cliff?
Let me consult Betteridge's law of headlines...
Ah, the answer is "no". Thanks, ABC.
I can do that now if it were not illegal to go that fast. I don't want a self driving car.
Oh wait... not weeping... the other thing.
Over the last couple of decades the airline industry has been going well out of their way to make sure that flying is unpleasant an experience as possible. Granted, they've had no small amount of cooperation from the government. But I've not a doubt in the world that some properly-directed lobbying and cries of "impacting the bottom line" would have returned the TSA thugs to their former jobs delivering pizza and greeting people at walmart ten or more years ago, if the airlines weren't complicit. And even aside from the TSA goons, they've reduced seat pitch, cut amenities, overbooked flights, run flights behind schedule or cancelled them,, eliminated meal services, and started nickel-and-diming with every sort of added fee imaginable, all 100% on their own initiative.
I've no bloody sympathy for them at all. A pox upon their houses.
Imagine all the people...
Wouldn't the self driving cars be engineered in a way that it can sense a clog forming and be able to re-route traffic around a clog, and mitigate congestion?
The curating around here is a f*cking joke.
My favourite website for many, many years appears to have truly died.
'auto industry expert' Yeah, I trust that guy. I'm sure he isn't biased at all. The premise is so farcical I actually laughed out loud when I saw the headline.
Anybody know where intelligent discussions of modern science and technology happen these days? It sure ain't here.
Laws will need to be passed insuring driving requires more hassle and discomfort then flying.
It won't be long before there will be ultra-high speed highways that are for automated cars only. Remember, with automated cars, traffic could theoretically look like a traffic jam in a snapshot but actually be moving at 100+ mph. A self driving car doesn't need 100+ ft between it and the car in front of it to account for reaction time.
More miles driven/ridden? Sure. However, those miles done by the 65+ crowd is probably not going to be during rush hour. Also, a lot of the longer trips are going to be done at night. Personally I'm looking forward to getting into the car in the evening, going to sleep and waking up at my vacation destination in the morning. As others have mentioned, self-driving only lanes will take care of most of the problem. That lane will be whipping along at 90+ with inches between each car.
All those loud and smelly horseless carriages are a menace and they scare the horses!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe an AI driving a car won’t be as good as some of the best drivers, but they’ll certainly be better than average. The main advantage is that they can take into account traffic factors that human drivers won’t be aware of, so they can optimize travel. There will be fewer accidents, and traffic will move more smoothly. At safer and more consistent speeds, people will get to their destinations sooner, and they’ll use less energy to do it.
Seriously, the costs of driving / mile will return to what we had back in the 60s, which was very low. What is needed now, is to raise taxes on gas/diesel slowly and invest into the infrastructure so that in the future, things will be safer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If a drunk can manage to remember to let his car drive itself then self driving cars will save 10,000 lives a year. If they end all accidents, that would be 30,000 lives saved per year.
That's worth a bit more congestion.
Because unlike when a mutant monkey is behind the wheel, the self driving car doesn't get into accidents because it's looking at a phone instead of the road, thus no slowing down circulation.
These people aren't thinking big picture. Forget a fleet of self owned self-driving cars. Yes, self-car ownership is a staple of American life right now, but it's death knell has been sounded.
Imagine a fleet of hundreds of self driving buses, vans, et cetera. Now cross that with Uber -- request a ride, and you get put on a list of stops where the bus is going to go. Picture having to wait no more than 15 minutes for a self-driving public transportation vehicle to take you anywhere in your city, with algorithms picking the most efficient route to get who needs a ride, when they need it. Who is going to buy their own car when you can just get a public transportation pass and go anywhere?
Hell, what government is going to allow people to drive their own cars when self-driving vehicles can drive for them? And when even self-driving self-owned cars turn out to be a detriment to the self-driving public transportation, welp...
We don't consider horses when designing modern roadways, outside of some very specific scenarios. We're entering an era where considering manually driven cars are going to become a similar relic of the past.
That would a VERY good thing - those bastards have managed to turn an experience, which was never all that brilliant, into a bloody nightmare. I have cut down my air traveling dramatically, but I still have to suffer the ignominy of travelling by air for intercontinental trips.
EVs, because of Tesla, are happening much faster. As such, these other car makers are being forced to also go down the paths of EVs as well as automated cars, all because of Musk.
And the costs / mile will be quite cheap.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's likely that a large part of the autonomous fleet will be shared, so they'd be limited in how many are on the roads at any given time. Part of the shared scheme would probably be surge pricing, giving an incentive for people to wait until the fees are lower (and traffic is lighter).
"Airlines also may face new competition as people choose to travel by car at speeds well over 100 mph between cities
Like they'll ever be allowed to go that fast. Most highways aren't Autobahn quality and even the Autobahn has speed limits in many places now.
And suppose you use your "self driving car" just to make little trips back and forth to friend like we "text" right now? Send the car with a small package, send the car with a joke, send the car... For anything?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The article references driving over 100 mph.
With maglev cars that speed could be 300 mph. Make them electric cars and they could be wirelessly charged while on the maglev highway. Then the cars battery only has to be used when on non-highway streets.
Combine this with Musk's Hyperloop connecting larger areas at even higher speeds could negate the need for flying for many people.
Unless it's YOUR change.
If self-driving cars enable those for whom driving became dangerous to be mobile again, then so be it. Uber is that current solution, just without the freedom of being alone in the car. And even Uber wants to go driverless.
And if congestion is the problem, ignoring the need for roadway and capacity is the current solution, so what's the difference? Higher taxes for road improvement/construction/maintenance? Our current administration had/has the opportunity to 'invest' in infrastructure repair and improvement, to no avail. Taxes are better spent where they buy votes, and commuters, middle class moms, and commercial drivers are not potential voters for those who would control that spending.
The faster the better. I, for one, look forward to welcoming our self-directed overlords.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Right now all that self-driving cars are clogging is our blogs and forums. It will be awhile before we know what they'll do in the real world. A variable, still to be determined 'awhile', mind you.
Where we live, our address wasn't even on the online mapping software until about six years ago. I'm not that expectant that a 'self driving car' will figure everything out immediately. Though I suppose they will 'learn' obscure locations by one or two manual drives there in 'learn mode.'
If you were single why not just buy a self-driving minivan and go wherever to sleep for the night? If you could rig it with some kind of simple shower and use an RV hookup ever week or so (that could be automated to happen while you were at work) it would be a better arrangement than most cramped first apartments...
The other thing to consider also, is that only a lot of miles built up in self-driving cars will give society the trust it needs to go ahead with the next step - self-driving flying cars (or drones if you will).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Imagine a fleet of hundreds of self driving buses, vans, et cetera
And every one of those is packed with other people.
If you don't think anyone who can will want their OWN self driving pod, the they do not have to wait to ride, you are nuts.
There will also be self-driving cars and buses, sure. But the price of a "car" will lower and more people than ever will own and use them because privacy and convenience will still be desirable for generations to come, if not forever...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The summary also indicates that it would likely REDUCE congestion, at least in some areas.
Suppose right now my 20-mile commute takes 35 minutes, so for 35 minutes I'm causing part of the congestion. I'm in your way from 8:00 to 8:35. The summary says self-driving cars will likely be able to drive much faster (perhaps in what used to be HOV lanes). If my car goes faster, that means the 20-mile commute takes less time. I'd only be on the road(and in your way) for 20 minutes rather than 35 minutes.
Actually I would be a lot more worried with self driving cars if I were an Uber driver. They may have courted technology to the point where they are replacing traditional taxis but technology is a fickle mistress and will probably soon be dumping them soon too.
The airline industry may contract somewhat but lets face it they don't make most of their money from short hops between cities within a few hours drive of each other. In fact if they are smart about it and run a self-driving airport bus service they can probably collect passengers from a wider area into a single airport and gain economies of scale.
Raising the gasoline fuel tax rate as self driving cars become more common would be the simplest solution. No one likes extra taxes because they make certain activities more difficult. Problem Solved.
Right now, the people who ride city transit systems are for the most part not the same people who drive. Drivers are in the habit of using their cars whenever they can, and vote for transit only when they think that buses and trains will take people off the road and out of their way.
But once autonomous car use becomes general, the whole culture of "my car" will be replaced by a rental culture in which people summon a car when needed for single rides. The attraction of ditching car payments, insurance payments and the whole parking mess will just be too irresistible for ordinary people, especially in crowded urban areas.
So once you're used to being chauffeured everywhere in fleet vehicles, why not check the "Will share ride" box on your car-summoning app to ride in a multi-passenger vehicle when you can? Depending on the money to be saved by riding this way, people will pick up the neighborhood walking habits that distinguishes transit riders.
That is really all to be said about this alarmist drivel.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Congestion is caused by jackholes who believe a red light means it's OK to text until half way through the subsequent green, when the person behind finally runs out of patience and starts hammering on their horn.
A close second to these morons are Third World immigrants who buy gigantic SUV's because they know they're such horrible drivers they're going to kill somebody sooner or later, and believe a bigger vehicle will ensure they won't be the ones to pay the price for their incompetence.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Your point applies only if SDCs are centrally controlled. If they are each an independent node that communicates with each other in a P2P or C2C method depending on massively decreased reaction times and localized road information that makes them much less vulnerable to a single point of failure while still retaining the bulk of the advantages. I foresee a hybrid of the 2 systems being the end solution, but I also bought Betamax, and laserdisc so who knows
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Really? We are posting entire pages by 'anonymous' now? These comments are not thought through properly, or even at all it seems. There will be a lot less congestion because now 2 people going from a to b and c, where b and c are moderately close - but not so close now that they would take the same car, can actually take the same car because neither of them have to find parking, walk from the park, walk back to the park or navigate headache creating traffic.
Furthermore, cars will not need to stop at lights when there any no pedestrians involved, reducing traffic further. They can travel at much higher speeds, reducing traffic. Families will on own 1 car because the 1 car return and do other errands after dropping off.... you guessed it, reducing traffic.
As far as the aero industry is concerned, who cares. industries die all the time. No body screamed when the wagon building industry closed...no body had a heart attack when the kerosene industry dried up, no body wept when the steam ship manufacturers had to find other things to make. These companies need to be at the front of technology, not at the tail end of it complaining when we find a way to actually get rid of the wastage and over usage of resources they have created while lining their pockets. No one seems to have mentioned that the car industry will essentially die off also, as there will be only 1/3 the requirement for vehicles. No one has noted that cabbies are immediately out of a job.. forever, and couriers, truck drivers, bus drivers... are we going to cry about them? are they going to get some kind of payout like the aero industry will no doubt put their hand out for?
If driverless cars are allowed as well, downtown traffic could get significantly worse: Right now, you have a choice of either use public transportation or a cab, or drive yourself and pay $$$ for premium parking.
With self-driving cars, there will be another option: Drive your own car to your office in downtown, and then send it along to park itself in some free or much cheaper parking place on the other side of town where it can wait until you are ready to be picked up again - that alone would lead to a lot of extra miles driven, and that's not even counting the disruption of stopping in traffic to let the owner back in at the end of the day.
Or come to think about it, why pay for parking at all? Need to do some shopping or a quick errand? I'm sure there will be plenty of people that would rather have their car circle the block on its own while they're inside instead of paying for parking....
Also, self driving cars will follow at a slightly further distance on average than human drivers. Specifically, the cars will follow at a safe driving distance based on nice simple math, while human drivers like to tailgate. This increases congestion since the cars are further spaced out.
There was an experiment done on I-5 in Washington just north of the city of Lacey where they painted stripes on the road set at a distance based on the speed limit (60mph) and there were signs telling drivers to remain that that distance from the car in front of them. Traffic congestion got so bad and stayed bad for weeks (even at unusal times on the weekends), that they came back in and removed all the signs and eventually the painted lines.
Self driving cars are little more than somebody wiring a GPS to the steering wheel and adding proximity sensors and road-following to avoid hitting things or driving onto lawns. They don't learn, they don't remember, they don't visually identify road signs, they fail badly if google maps isn't up to date because the town you're passing through forgot to tell them about a new stop sign. Like all artificial intelligence from spell checking to OCR, they're only AI until they're deployed, then they're just "software", a set of dumb algorithms that barely get the job done most of the time. Except that all-most = injured people, in this case.
They're not going to clog highways because in all likelihood, after initial testing, they won't be allowed out of urban sunbelt areas, being too stupid to react reasonably to weather, a paper bag blowing into the road, or anything else surprising to programmers in Mountain View, CA. When you lease (not buy) one of these, it will come with a coverage map, like the ones used in cell phone ads, and said map will be seasonal and sparse. That's assuming you're even allowed to lease one; for the first few decades until cognitive guidance is cheap enough they'll probably be limited to Uber-like taxi usage, because safety and lawsuits.
Don't you believe it...
Around where i work, all the over 65s visit the bank during lunchtime, when those of us who have to work are on our lunch break. During the mornings and afternoons the banks are empty, the over 65s generally don't have to work yet for some reason they choose to visit banks during the most congested time, and cause those of us with a short time limited lunch break to waste all of it stood in a queue.
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Full douche-mode. Glad that worked out for you. Your balls are somewhere back in common sense.
As well as driving the car, perhaps the software can choose an optimal time to leave so as to spread the traffic out as much as possible. Jams tend to happen where people all do the same thing at the same time (like go to work).
There are several substantial issues here:
- We don't have the cars yet. There are exactly zero on the market.
- If auto makers treat them like the electric or hybrid car, the efficiency is fully consumed in the sticker price. That means the economics are going to be strongly adverse. There is not enough wealth to clog the highways.
- they are going to drive much more safely, but also much more efficiently. Humans with their stop-and-go nonsense will not be the driving source of delays in a self-driving rich environment. Slowing to gawk at accidents or police vehicles will be gone too. In Phoenix the drivers are afraid of underpasses, overpasses, and they race to the end of a merge and cut 20 people off to get ahead of the line - those too will be gone.
Finally, this would be a great problem to have. There is an intense ecosystem around automobiles. If there was such huge demand that they could have crap-tacularly predatorial pricing and still clog the highways then politicians, bankers, and big-car industry folks should start dancing in the streets today. There will be enough taxes to fund obamacare AND social security for another 10 years. Yay!
I doubt that is the problem. I suspect that half of all drivers are control freaks so the demand is over-estimated. After the hype-peak we will see what economics and engineers actually make possible. Then we can ask about what the problems are.
It might be easier to avoid peak times too though, with a self driving car I can leave early and eat breakfast in the car, maybe even shave. Video chat with the wife on the way home so she won't mind so much being late getting back.
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And it has already been thoroughly debunked. Just because the roads are clear doesn't mean you need more groceries.
Yikes, now people are worrying about mass adoption of technology that isn't even available to the general public yet.
/.) need to get a life.
The authors of the article (and whoever submitted the article to
And if it's REALLY bad and we all just go semi-nomadic, crawling along from place to place at 1-2 mph, you could just work from your car and have a pizza drone bring you food, and the pet cleanup drones carry away your waste.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Maroons.
Thanks to the TSA, travel has become considerably more dangerous in the past 15 years because more and more people are willing to accept the inconvenience of driving rather than be subject to the long lines, indignities, irradiation and sexual assault carried out in the name of security theater. Self-driving cars will make driving safer and more convenient that it currently is. Meanwhile, the TSA is making air travel increasingly painful.
This is the Associated Press giving voice to the buggy whip makers and hostlers.
It will be interesting wether the trust and reliability will ever reach the point where a single autonomous vehicle will ever be safe enough to just fall asleep and expect to wake at your arrival point. With piloted mass transit vehicles this is possible because there is an attendant and/or security measure in place.
With individual vehicles, unless a lot of freedom is given up with regard to travel options, it's easy to expect there will be risks and uncertainties. Where might you wake up indeed?
I have driven in some of the largest cities in the world. Generally it is not the volume of traffic that is the problem, but the screwups. If two people have a fenderbender on a major bridge, the entire system pretty much collapses while the two nitwits block everything.
Then the people who can go by safely will crawl by instead of whizzing by.
Next it is the nitwits who created many of our crap intersections, traffic patterns, lighting timings, etc, who have clogged our streets with 100 stuck east bound cars while 3 northbound cars get a 2 hour green.
Plus once it is 100% driverless then the cars can maintain very narrow lanes in a bumper to bumper formation. Thus I say the exact opposite. Driverless will zip around at speeds using the roads as efficiently as is possible. Thus one of the driverless changes will be a massive reduction in the amount of road infrastructure required.
This is assuming that people will be able to afford the gas or electricity. The way people gripe now about the cost, can't see them using it more.
Bars. So what you are saying is that "Driving While Intoxicated" V1.0 will be replaced with the non-criminal DWI V2.0 "Driven While Intoxicated." Love it.
Prostitutes will love it. "Hey, John, wanna have a little party?" "Sure, when." "My car with extra wide back seat will be here in 3 minutes and 22 seconds"
Philanderers having Nooners now will do it on the way to work.
Private Eyes will be dying to hack those cars for video footage.
Etc. Yes, it will transform *many* industries ... !
Pity we don't tax the profits of the land investors for the freeway, air pollution, health, education and welfare costs of sprawl
Instead, more gas tax, more Highway patrol, more surveillance, more divorce, more stressed out shootings, rammings and killings
Sometimes I despair of my fellow Americans Intelligence.
see high frequency trading. I suppose you could also make the argument that instant access to high calorie food helps obesity along (hot pockets anyone?). George Orwell wrote a well known book about TV and it's dangers. Cotton mills really did eliminate a lot of jobs ( among other inventions during the industrial rev).
The Luddites had a reason for being. They didn't spring up out of thin air. They were real people losing their livelihoods and they never got them back. Neither did their children. After about 80-100 years their grandkids started to see full employment as tech caught up.
That said I think the argument is off base. Rampant poverty brought on by automation will mean there won't be a lot of folks traveling. It's not like we're gonna build a public transportation network just _anyone_ can use out of these Self Driving Cars, right?
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As soon as self-driving cars are marginally affordable, you hitting someone will be partial negligence because you didn't have a SDC. This will force insurance rates up, which will reduce the comparative price of SDCs. This will in turn increase SDC sales, which will drive prices down. This will increase the negligence aspect of any crash in an HDC and increase lawsuit payouts, increasing insurance, etc.
There's a tipping point where you won't be able to afford an HDC -- you'll only be able to afford time-share SDCs and may later afford personal SDCs.
So yes, first the rich have them, then ultimately only the rich will be able to drive their own car.
A self driving car would only need a mirror if there was a manual option. And even then a mirror would be redundant as rear situational awareness for the human driver could easily be provided on interior monitors. I also think an autonomous-car future would see a lot of car sharing to public transport hubs. A-Cars won't need to park. They will circulate from ride to ride. At least in cities. And that is where most people will be living if trends continue. People in dense population centers don't own cars even when they can afford them. Check out car ownership stats for Manhatten . What can one say about a Johnny Cab? It will be cheap. And no tip. Of course in low density population areas people will own their own cars or co-own cars.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Abolish Airlines, make way for personal drones. Why should a few fat cats monopolize the airspace? Think millions of Drones vs a handful of Airliners.
OK, transoceanic routes for SST's.
It would result in far less cars on the road. Why? Because many more people would not care to own one but only that one would take them where they wished pretty much when they wished. The rest of the time the car would suffer the needs of other would be passengers instead of being parked idle at an office complex or such and then driven home. It would result in the most efficient use of cars to do desired traveling. IT is doubtful much more travel than today would be desired. It even more doubtful that more cars would be on the road.
In case more people will usw cars then the Highways will be filled. Traffic jams will occur reducing the average speed. Therefore, moving more in suburban areas will not be an option. As there was s no space for new roads and no money to support existing roads , traffic will get worse. Cars are not the solution for urban an inter city travel. Rail systems are, as they allow to travel faster and in a more compact way.
Most of the congestion I've seen in Vancouver, Canada is from piss poor driving skills.
Lot of the slow down is caused by shitty merging, slow merging, slow exits, poor acceleration to match speeds causing frequent accordion effects. Unsure drivers get in front from merge lanes not at the highway speed frequently. It causes a lot of slow downs, it adds up over the day, which makes it worse as these poor skilled drivers cause even more problems as the space between vehicles is reduced.
So basically, their lack of skill increases the difficulty of driving, which makes them cause even more slow downs.
If we have self driving cars simply driving properly it will already significantly reduce congestion. In a perfect system all cars could go the speed limit always without being slowed down. (Perfection is impossible, but we should be able to get a lot closer than where we are now)
With remote start and everything! You just load a few dozen up and park them in a remote inconspicuous areas. When D-day is here you just activate them all remotely while you are safely out of the country. I can just imagine the carnage ten modified self-driving rental cars could do in NYC.... The best part is that people will see them and think, "OH! Its in summon mode! How neat!"
So which one are they worried about?
People use them too much and traffic grinds to a halt?
Or people choose to use them instead of flying because they can go over 100 mph on highways?
It's not going to work both ways, guys.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
"do you know how to earn 1 million dollar ? Invest 1 billion in the airline industry".
The airline industry is unfortunately under attack by low cost, and there has been a few incidents which hit it very hard. it is the very first industry to suffer in case of crisis. The low cost carrier are putting price traditional airline can only follow to the bottom of service. You want cheap flights ? well this is the result : a race to the bottom in quality. Nobody buys a 1000$ comfortable flight when they can get away with a 120$ uncomfortable one. Except that afterward they keep yapping and complaining about it. You want a meal service no overbooking and good seat pitch ? Take business and first. The service is still good there. But I am betting like 99+% of the complainer that you fly eco like most of the people. Well you get what you pay for. Compare the price of a boston-new york flight of today with one of 30 or 40 years ago : price have fallen not risen with inflation, there has been a lot of bankruptcy. Yes airline try to get back at rising cost and lowering airfare with amenities. You want to see the responsible ? Look in a frigging mirror. People want cheap airfare but first class quality. Good luck with that.
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When these self driving cars get into an accident, and they will, who is liable? The manufacturer? The owner/driver?
I think we are assuming self driving cars will be accepted by a large number of people. The other factor nobody does address is that self driving cars only address the safety factor. It does nothing to help the congestion, the lack of capacity or the gridlock caused by too many vehicles.
Having endured 2 hours on i-95 south of Washington last Friday, the two biggest wins for self driving cars are (1) self driving cars don't slow down 30% to look at oddities on the side of the road, like broken down vehicles or wrecks which are clearly out of the flow of traffic and (2) know how to fucking merge when lanes reduce or at on-ramps. That alone would reduce traffic enough to accommodate all the new driver miles.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
The Manhattan CBD, which has a much higher density of roads than any other place in America and in which millions work every day, has a carrying capacity of about 6,000 moving cars at any one time. If you lower the cost of keeping a car moving on the road even more then there will be more cars occupying that space.
There is a solution, we can charge a per minute fee for using the public road space. In the most dense areas $0.10/min on 10-25 mph streets, $0.15/min on 30-45mph roads, $0.20/min on 45-60mph roads, etc.
But we are all so used to being freeloaders that it is politically difficult to implement any kind of user fee for existing asphalt. Things will get much much worse before we put in place any sensible solution.
This article focuses on one variable in a far more complex formula with many variable that are changing. Here are just a couple obvious likely changes
There will be fewer cars:
Many families who currently have two cars will need only one because they will be able to summon the car making sharing practical
The cost of taxi service will plummet and many people won't need a car at all
Bus service will transform into a fleet of smaller vehicles with many more routes
Roadways will be more efficient:
Self driving cars won't slow down to see accidents
They will automatically route around congestion
They will follow consistently at a safe distance at the road's currently rated speed
They will coordinate their speed to coordinate intersection passage by bunching north-south and east-west traffic to be 180 degrees out of phase
Speed limits will be raised significantly because safety margins will become less necessary
TFA ignores other advancements in competing transportation technologies including hyper loop, improved rail and ride sharing of various kinds.
Greed is the root of all evil.
As we'll work in our cars, the journey will be like:
-Four hours commute in the morning, answering emails, having teleconferences and writing docs.
- Reach the office, take a coffee, socialize, eat. Eating optionally can be done in the car too.
- Back in the car, that evening jam isn't going to form by itself.
- Four hours commute back home, more work in the car. In the quiet environment, people is incredibly productive.
- Work not finished, still a teleconference to do. The car has to circle the neighborhood a couple of times to allow for your overtime. You cannot really teleconference from home, that would be unprofessional. While waiting for the last person to connect from the London traffic jam, you chat a bit with your neighbor, that is also being driven around, just to chill a bit, have a smoke.
And that will be the working day of the near future. Going on vacation will be similar, but with the kids in the back seat with VR helmets enjoying the forest you are going to, with added gnomes and elves, (optional item, in-app purchase).
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Self driving cars, if they drive the posted speed limit, will improve traffic flow. It's all the idiots that slow down to stare at accidents, take curves slower, don't pay attention to their speed, try to cut people off to weave through traffic that cause accidents and jams. I for one look forward to being able to use cruise control more consistently without needing to constantly turn it off because some idiot is going below the speed limit.
>Around where i work, all the over 65s visit the bank during lunchtime,
Actually they probably don't. By nature of my career I've frequently not been working office hours so I got to observe these things a bit better than most. Banks cut costs by employing fewer people when most are at work. The thing is, if you show up at 8am on a Monday morning- there is a long queue and very few tellers serving them (often just one)... and many of them will still be waiting in line when lunchtime comes around (and the bank adds more tellers for the expected extra lunch-time visitors.
They may BE there when you show up at at lunch, but mostly they've BEEN there for hours already. I know, I've shown up at banks at 8am on a Monday and failed to get helped until after 1pm more than once.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
What about deliveries. I think deliveries of small items will increase if we have ready access to cars that can drop of things on their own.
Sounds to me like some local governments may be a wee bit worried that their local police won't be able to setup roadblocks and speedtraps to write out massive amounts of tickets to fill their coffers anymore? With self driving cars all going the speed limit and obeying all the traffic laws.... what will they do for money.
Just you wait until the governments realize their DMV functions are no longer required (or at least can be reduced to a tiny fraction of their current size). The buggy whip industry could never raise a similar stink, it just didn't have the numbers and the power and the unions.
You can't handle the truth.
I must not understand the definition of clog if our highways will be clogged with cars moving over 100mph. So the argument is the highways will be clogged because too many people use them but part of the reason they will use them is because they will be a faster, easier alternative to airplanes. Anyone else see a hole in that logic?
As others have mentioned, self-driving only lanes will take care of most of the problem. That lane will be whipping along at 90+ with inches between each car.
Wishful thinking.
For one thing, autonomous cars can still have accidents - mechanical failure, a deer jumping onto the road, a rock fall - anything, really. So they need a safe distance between them, because stopping is not instantaneous, especially not with passengers who are fragile and can't handle 100G.
And that brings us over to problem #2: Passengers do not handle acceleration as well as drivers do. People are uncomfortable when being passengers in a car that accelerates and decelerates aggressively, even if they feel no such discomfort when driving themselves. This means that overall, the amount of time to get up to speed will go up, not down, as the number of single-person human-driven cars go down.
As of right now, all indications are that self driving cars will drive slower than human drivers, as well as accelerating and braking slower. All in the name of safety and comfort.
This has got to be the worst excuse I have ever herd !!
If you know the problem, why do you still go at noon time.
If you are a professional, you can leave 15 minutes earlier and do your business without problem.
Even if you are an hourly type with an A$$ for a boss, you can still leave 15 minutes early.
Please state your real objections and don't hide behind poor excuses.
My unpaved driveway is 1000 feet long, with 200+ feet of vertical climb. If you add 6" of fresh snow to that it becomes driving where I know the driveway to be more then the current visual picture which is nothing but a field of blinding white. This is no problem in my current subaru with a little bit of practice, however as much as I would _really_ like to have a SDC take my drunken ass from A -> $home , I am extremely skeptical of their abilities to hand many of the day to day things like north east weather or oil and stone paving that happen as you move away from the urban areas where it seems that all this testing is going on.
The engineer that invents the efficient "rock out of a ditch" algorithm will get a beer from me!
The OP makes a good point, however, the evolution of self driving VEHICLES may be quite different from what is presently envisioned. Think instead of a vheilce the size of, say, a large dog, that can wtih a vrey salml energy footprint transport an urgently ndeeed pgakace to its destination. Think of delivery service clearinghouses that can group deliveries and routes. Think of cost savings for seniors care, and the elimination of their need for owning their own cars or requiring services of local support organizations. For entertainment value, read old issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines from the 1930's through the 1960's that offered predictions of what the future would be like. The ubiquity of future flying automobiles is one of my favorite failed prognostications. I also recall seeing a 35mm film put out by Union Carbide that showed the future of homes. One entire bedroom was occupied by the family's home computer. As for 100mph self driving automobiles, that is simple to prevent.
Wishful thinking. For one thing, autonomous cars can still have accidents - mechanical failure, a deer jumping onto the road, a rock fall - anything, really. So they need a safe distance between them, because stopping is not instantaneous, especially not with passengers who are fragile and can't handle 100G.
A "safe" distance between cars is defined by the reaction time of the driver, not the speed they are traveling. Nobody expects a driver to come to a complete stop in the distance available between two vehicles, just that they react quickly enough to not rear-end the vehicle in front. For autonomous cars traveling in a "pack" mode, the difference between the first car starting to brake and the last car also braking is going to be measured in small fractions of a second. Computer driven cars can also communicate how hard they are braking so they won't catch up to each other. So the vehicles can travel much closer together.
And that brings us over to problem #2: Passengers do not handle acceleration as well as drivers do. People are uncomfortable when being passengers in a car that accelerates and decelerates aggressively, even if they feel no such discomfort when driving themselves. This means that overall, the amount of time to get up to speed will go up, not down, as the number of single-person human-driven cars go down.
As of right now, all indications are that self driving cars will drive slower than human drivers, as well as accelerating and braking slower. All in the name of safety and comfort.
I agree that passengers want a gentle ride, however what time frame are you thinking about when you say "As of right now"? Six months? Six years? If you remove the need to sit upright and view the road ahead, there's no reason we can't lay down in seats that swivel with acceleration. If the seats can rotate so that the perceived acceleration is always "down", then you won't even spill your coffee under rapid acceleration. Time will tell and I'm looking forward to seeing what evolves.
They would move if someone tried to ticket them or a fire truck is coming.
Then what's the problem in the latter case? The idea with firelanes is to allow fire trucks access. If the cars are smart enough to give the fire trucks access if necessary, we no longer need to waste the space the other 99.9% of the time.
In the prior, well, the ticket agent can often just block the car in so it can't safely move out of the way. Or even just get a picture of the plates and fill out the rest of the paperwork to mail to the registered owner.
They'd bribe someone to make it legal to use handicap spots because the can move easily (in theory).
Again, parking ticket authority stops behind the vehicle, it's not moving. Bribing others for their handicapped stickers? That would trip conspiracy and RICO charges, I think. Too dangerous.
In whole, I find your ideas to be wild speculation.
I don't read AC A human right
The airlines have only themselves, their own greed, and their utter rolling over for the TSA to blame for making air travel so overpriced and unpleasant that people will avoid it whenever possible.
No... People being stupid and crashing into other people will clog our Highways.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
That is the bigger issue. Cars will travel many more miles when people can sleep in their cars while having it drive overnight. Why buy a $500 plane ticket when it can cost $50 in gas to drive to the beach on Friday night, then drive back again on Saturday night?
I am surprised that self driving cars are what is getting the most attention and research. I thought it would be 30 years before we would see them widespread. But, with Tesla and Google, I'm not sure.
I also worry about them driving from LA/SF to Vegas for the weekend. Maybe we can set them to drive at 55mph to conserve fuel, but the number of long trips that people will take will increase quite a bit.
If you remove the need to sit upright and view the road ahead, there's no reason we can't lay down in seats that swivel with acceleration.
Well, yeah, there is: car sickness.
1) They will get in far fewer collisions/accidents, because they have eyes in the back of their heads (and sides and butts)
2) They won't "rubberneck" to look over at all the shiny flashing police car lights at a traffic collision, which seems to cause WAY more congestion in both directions on the highway even when there is NO LANE BLOCKAGE!!
Unless they make them go a lot faster (including breaking the speed limit), then yes, they will clog up the roads. Slow cars get in the way!
Best drug courier ever!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
No.
Think clearly. People will not need individual cars if a shared car can drive between houses as needed. My concern about shared driving is that there will be no shared car in my area when needed. With self driving cars, that problem will be gone. Thus less people will need a personal car.
> travel by car at speeds well over 100 mph between cities a few hundred miles apart
Once a car journalist asked a Ferrari exec what is the meaning of 320km/h top speed in their F575 grand tourer car, considering the (rather large) fuel tank would then run dry in under 15 minutes. The exec responded that is by design, because at such high speed even the top-tier Pirelli Zero or Goodyear tyre will wear down to slick-and-tread in 15 minutes, making it unsafe to continue the journey without a pit stop!
The aesop is: for really high speeds on land you need steel wheels on steel railroad. Welcome to the amanzing world of super-express trains!
They also forget to mention the additional 30,000 people on the roads each year, due to not having died to road accidents.
The researcher fails to consider the massive efficiency increases from a large population of driverless cars.
Human drivers _suck_. They create congestion for no reason and propagate standing waves in traffic long after the initiator has been cleared.
Can't a string of cars go 100 miles an hour, each separated by 4 feet? Seems like congestion would go away as you take away human control..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Traffic snarls are caused caused by people. Smart cars are better drivers because they lack hormones. They can see far ahead and make decisions to slow down, let other vehicles merge, and eliminate the constant pulsation of stop and go that makes us crazy. I'm looking forward to binge watching Netflix or taking a nap.