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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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be-T J
Now they are the taxi cartels. Brilliant.
Do you have ESP?
For the past 30 or more years, there's been a "progressivist" initiative in urban planning to significantly reduce the number of private motor vehicles on the road in densified urban areas (for which read "downtown" - to distinguish it from "inner urban" areas, for which read "slums"). It - along with housing densification itself - is one of the core goals of New Urbanism.
New Urbanism, in turn, is dedicated to reducing urban sprawl (for which read "suburbs"), in part by mandating high-density, multi-family housing, mixed-use planning (for which read "medium- and high-rises with residential units on top and retail at street level"). It regards with disdain that portion of the population that does not care for apartment living and mass transit as a lifestyle, and seeks to enforce its vision by changing planning law and packing planning commissions, not just in big cities, but in small and medium ones, as well.
A prime example of a city whose planning process is now wholly based on New Urbanist principles is San Francisco, which has systematically constrained parking by consistently approving major new construction only on condition that it be designed with new parking that's deliberately inadequate for the expected demand. (The idea being to make finding a parking place so difficult that it will basically force commuters to take public transit, rather than drive.) Ask any San Francisco resident or commuter (other than a fanatic bike geek) how that has worked out.
Uber and Lyft are merely taking advantage of the New Urbanist movement to try to mandate that cities run by progressives enact traffic-reduction policies that will result in their companies making the maximum possible profit from the hapless residents of and commuters to these cities.
I only hope that the New Urbanist masterminds stab them in the back by mandating fleets of city-owned self-driving cars to serve their residents and visitors ...
Check out my novel.
My uncle has a country place, no one knows about.
There is an oft repeated statement that silicon valley press use when talking about the future of cars (probably repeating something they've heard from the automated driving / internet taxi services) - car ownership is inefficient as cars spend most of their time parked. While true on the surface, it overlooks a key factor - the majority of car usage happens at approximately the same time when people go to and return from work. This means any alternative to ownership needs to satisfy peak usage which returns back to most cars spending the majority of their time parked . The only solution to this is having peak users share the vehicles, in which case congratulations - you just invented the bus.