Uber and Lyft Want You Banned From Using Your Own Self-Driving Car in Urban Areas (siliconbeat.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Mercury News: The rabble can't be trusted with self-driving cars, and only companies operating fleets of them should be able to use them in dense urban areas. So say Uber and Lyft, as signatories to a new list of transportation goals developed by a group of international non-governmental organizations and titled "Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities"... According to Principle No. 10, "Shared fleets can provide more affordable access to all, maximize public safety and emissions benefits, ensure that maintenance and software upgrades are managed by professionals..."
It's stated reason is to "actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, in line with broader policy trends to reduce the use of personal cars in dense urban areas." But others remain suspicious.

Gizmodo complains that the proposal "doesn't exactly sound like the freedom-filled future sci-fi writers have been promising, now does it?" and concludes that Uber and Lyft "have a hot new idea for screwing over city-dwellers."

Comments

New direction for Uber

[ceoyoyo]

So, basically the complete opposite of what Uber currently says they stand for (people owning their own vehicles and using them to make some extra money "sharing" rides).

Uber clearly has the best interests of the people at heart and isn't just in it to make a buck by whatever means are more convenient.

Re:New direction for Uber

[Aighearach]

Also, the complete opposite of their normal attitude about regulations.

It is disgusting, and this is going to really cut the legs out from under a lot of their supporters, because this is a lot of double-speak to ask of people!

Re:New direction for Uber

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Can you say "rent seeking"? Sure, I thought you could.

Re:New direction for Uber

[WarJolt]

It reminds me of Airliners. Commercial Airliners always want to push out General Aviation, as if they aren't paying their "fair share". Really they just want to own more of the sky. The airspace is for all Americans to use and so is the road as long as you can use it responsibly. We need to prevent profit-seeking corporations from co-opting the public welfare. It almost never works out the way they claim.

Re:New direction for Uber

[gfxguy]

That's not really what they say, though - if everyone is driving themselves, then there's nobody to pay for a ride.

The obvious self interest doesn't escape me, but for the goals they are stating "to 'actualize the promise of reductions in vehicles, parking, and congestion, in line with broader policy trends to reduce the use of personal cars in dense urban areas.'," they aren't wrong, either.

I'm not saying I agree with these companies, but a lot of good ideas get shot down with knee jerk reactions simply because somebody stands to make a profit on them.

Re: New direction for Uber

[vtcodger]

"currently, there are no self-driving cars"

You need to have vision laddie. If you come to the rent-seeking party only when self driving cars become available, there may be naught but crumbs available because all the profitable franchises have been locked down by forward thinking innovators.

BTW, What do you want to bet that the "Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities" includes getting rid of slow, dangerous, dirty, public transportation services and banning inefficient government run taxis and ride sharing?

Re:New direction for Uber

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be fine with it so long as they'd be required to pay for all road maintenance. I get a funny feeling though they'd still expect roads to be tax payer funded.

Re:New direction for Uber

[ceoyoyo]

A lot of Slashdotters defend Uber (or used to anyway) based on them upsetting the admittedly corrupt taxi industry. Now they not only want to replace the taxi industry, but they want to make it so not only can't you run a taxi to compete with them, you can't even own the vehicle to do it.

There was also a lot of "oh, Uber is just matching people who want to share rides!" which was always BS. Uber was never about ridesharing.

Re:New direction for Uber

[ceoyoyo]

Yeah, I skip any sentence that starts with words like "actualize."

Seriously, reducing cars in dense urban areas is great. However, there seem to be two reasonable ways to do it: provide alternatives that compete with personal vehicles or provide public transportation and regulations against personal vehicles.

The Uber way, legislating a for-profit exclusive private service that doesn't even have to compete with personal vehicles, is just ripe for abuse.

No Parking Forever

[Applehu Akbar]

There will be no need to legislate against provately-owned cars, autonomous or otherwise.

As self-driving fleets proliferate, there will be irresistible temptation on the part of urban developers to cut back on parking spaces at businesses, which will be needed only for individually owned cars; instead of a sea of parking spaces for all customers at a movie theater, the business will expand into its parking area, leaving only one row of "VIP spaces" that the diminishing number of car owners will have to pay for. As mass car culture fades, owning your own autonomous car will be like owning your own plane, a niche market for the well off. As hoi polloi buzz around in autonomous fleet cars that park only in industrial-zone warehouses when out of service, the remaining individual owners will pay for parking spaces as though they were airport tiedowns or marina slips.

Re:No Parking Forever

[roman_mir]

Complete and utter nonsense. My car is an extension of my home, only it is portable. Same for most other drivers. I keep things in my car that I need (for work mostly). A family with kids keeps crap in their cars that are necessary for them, for various extracurricular activities, for entertainment, whatever. As cars become better at avoiding obstacles and preventing crashes there will be more people on the roads driving them, not fewer and people want to own stuff, that is why they want to buy houses rather than renting (mostly). Not everybody can afford it but that is a different matter.

In short this is crap, Lyft and Uber will get nowhere with this fast.

Re:No Parking Forever

[iggymanz]

why didn't that happen decades ago with taxis? what's the difference?

Re:No Parking Forever

[Anonymous Coward]

You're forgetting a critical point: AV cars can be self-owned too. There are plenty of companies with interest in selling privately owned AV cars - indeed, that's at the moment the majority of AV cars.

Economics: If drivers can afford the current cars, they are likely to be able to afford the cheaper AV cars.

Parking: If the self-owned AV car parks by itself, how much will people care? And quite a lot of existing parking spots aren't likely to be removed.

So the real question is whether people will still buy AV cars - or will they move to shared AV services? The latter may or may not be cheaper - but the former will always be more available and more customizable.

The fact that Uber and Lyft have to invoke the heavy hand of the Law, suggests that they foresee people keeping privately owned cars - as long as there's a choice.

Re:No Parking Forever

[Glarimore]

When I request an Uber, it's usually at my door in less than five minutes and I can see it's progress. Formerly, when requesting a cab, it could take up to thirty minutes to arrive, if it bothered to show up at all -- and it cost twice as much.

It won't go over well.

[Gravis Zero]

I won't lie, if laws like they suggest ever got passed then I would straight up burn down the local Uber/Lyft/Assholes Inc. hub and destroy all the cars there. Then I would post a video of it burning and encourage others to do the same. Tyranny must be opposed.

Neo-feudalism

[nickmalthus]

This is a clear glimpse into the machinations of the corporatocracy wishing to impose their totalitarian vision of the future.

In this "gig economy" foisted on us with all of it's service jobs, private toll roads, apartments, cloud services, and soon to be automated car fleets the every day person will legally own very little. Instead immortal corporations will try to take ownership of most property and the rest of us will live as serfs subjugated to the shifting legal terms of service by said corporations.

Our whole legal systems is built around property rights and only the affairs of property holders seems to matter. Any consideration of the ordinary person is considered to be "cumbersome regulations" that should be eliminated.

What about the jaywalking problem?

[whoever57]

Cities that go 100% autonomous will have to solve the jaywalking problem.

If all the vehicles on the road are self-driving, then, from a safety perspective, there is nothing to stop a pedestrian crossing when and where they want, in the knowledge that the autonomous vehicles will stop for them. This will cause chaos with the flow of traffic.

Net result: somehow jaywalking must be eliminated.

First they replaced the taxi cartels

[Trailer Trash]

Now they are the taxi cartels. Brilliant.