Waymos crash less than human drivers

>congestion

I'd think congestion would go up as AVs become more popular, with average occupancy rates per vehicle going down. Since some of the time the vehicle will be driving without any passengers inside. Especially with personally owned AVs. Think of sending a no-human-passenger car to pick up the dog at the vets office. Or a car circling the neighborhood when it is inconvenient to park (parking lot full, expensive, whatever).

Up to 30% of cars on city streets at any given time are looking for parking [1].

Cars are also the least utilized asset class, being parked 95% of the time [2].

AVs, by virtue of being able to coordinate fleet-wide and ability to park anywhere rather than only one's home or destination, would be able to gain incredible efficiencies relative to status quo.

Atop those efficiencies, removing both the constraint of having a driver and the constraint of excessive safety systems to make up for human inattentiveness means AVs can get drastically smaller as vehicles, further improving road utilization (imagine lots of 1- and 2-seaters zipping by). And roads themselves can become narrower because there is less room for error with AVs instead of humans.

Finally, traffic lights coordinating with fleets would further reduce time to destination (hurry up and finish).

Self-driving vehicles give us the opportunity to rethink almost all of our physical infrastructure and create way more human-friendly cities.

[1] http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf

[2] https://senseable.mit.edu/unparking/

> AVs, by virtue of being able to coordinate fleet-wide and ability to park anywhere rather than only one's home or destination, would be able to gain incredible efficiencies relative to status quo.

> Atop those efficiencies, removing both the constraint of having a driver and the constraint of excessive safety systems to make up for human inattentiveness means AVs can get drastically smaller as vehicles, further improving road utilization (imagine lots of 1- and 2-seaters zipping by). And roads themselves can become narrower because there is less room for error with AVs instead of humans.

The first part is mostly describing taxis, so the incredible efficiencies relative to the status quo can be loosely observed through them. Just subtract out wage and a slight "technological scale" bonus, and you can estimate what it would be. Then add in the expected investor returns for being a technology company and see the improvements disappear.

The second part, I wonder. Cars already average under 2 occupants, with most just being the driver. If this is what is was needed for significantly smaller cars, we would already have them. Lack of smaller cars is mostly a cultural issue, not a technical one.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'd like to think there's more efficiency to be gained when the scale is city-wide rather than a small subset of demand being attended to reactively.

Ideally this would be a municipal fleet and transportation just another utility like water, electrical, and broadband. Admittedly this would require strong political power and vision, as anything that remakes physical infrastructure does.

Agree small cars are a cultural/identity issue tho usually a rather rational one as well, given safety vis-a-vis 7000lb SUVs. However, I don't think people's aversions to spend $20k+ on a city-only vehicle has any bearing on whether they would be willing to be being taken places in one when its the most convenient/safest/fastest way to get places. A city-wide transportation utility obviates most of the need/desire for individual car ownership.

To put it in tech biz terms, everything in tech is bundling or unbundling. Ownership of cars is the unbundled version of transport, and took over due to convenience and creature comforts. Now a new tech has come out that swings the pendulum toward bundled being more convenient & optimal.

Every city street would have 4 lanes without the need for free car storage. Maybe make one of them a bike lane or widen the sidewalks and have 3 lanes for 30% more capacity. Also, traffic engineering could be optimized to a much greater extent since you wouldn't have to worry about all the affordances which keep humans from getting confused, keep them from getting aggressive, keep them from speeding, etc. Also, most congestion is caused by drivers causing turbulence by switching lanes, stopping each other from switching lanes, getting in the wrong lane, etc. A city of only AVs would probably flow much more smoothly.

Why are we using self-driving vehicles as a panacea for historical underinvestment in public transport?

Not saying that they wouldn't play a role in a functional public transport system, they'd be invaluable for the last two miles from your station to your destination.

But while our people transporting systems prioritise roads and cars, we will never have the high quality and safe public transport that high quality of life cities thrive on.

(And while I write this from NZ, with only limited experiences of LA and SF, we copied America, we went for sprawl and freeways, and it's strangling our largest city.)

I know and spend time with people who live in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg, that don't own a car, because they don't need to own a car.

They might rent one for a holiday into Italy, or they might use an app like Lime / Bird etc. to rent very short term a tiny car like a BMW i3 for a big grocery shop.

But because their cities are dense, and mix commercial with residential (e.g., ā bunch of 5 storey apartment buildings with the ground/first floor being commercial, depending on where you are), they can often buy groceries at the local market on foot on their way home from the U-Bahn, or head down to the local Getränkhandel on a bike with a basket or two to buy their beer and bottled water.

Centralising commerce away from residential, especially with big box shopping areas, is predicated on car culture, and bakes in the need for cars.

TL;DR self-driving vehicles alone are a band-aid over an unsustainable transport culture and strategy.

But they'll form a critical part of a sustainable one.

The reason we need self-driving cars is because we need cars. The reason we need cars is because of the way our cities are structured. The reason our cities are structured the way they are is due to large land availability & zoning laws, leading to massive spread.

Public transit will work for some of the people some of the time. (That is, if it can even be built - highly recommend Ezra Klein's new book Abundance on ways to get out of this).

For the people that public transit won't work for, you need to come up with a new solution if you want to see cars go away: a solution that makes going from A to B some combination of easier, cheaper, faster, more convenient than driving. Or, a solution that brings B closer to A (like changing zoning laws or building cheaper housing in metro areas).

Hear me out, I've spent years thinking about this :)

Yes, past underinvestment is bad. And yes, initially they are a band-aid, until yes they do become critical.

My excitement for self-driving tech isn't about the short term changes, but just how powerful a technology this is in the longer term. Ultimately this tech is not about cars, it's about the ability to automate the movement of mass. This is novel and meaningful.

An obvious medium-term implication of self-driving is that cities will ban human drivers, because that way cities can ditch a bunch of high-cost infrastructure required because of human fallibility. Up until that point, self-driving would be a band-aid. After that point, the dominoes start to fall.

1. Form factors change: cars become 1-4 person pods, stripped of the unnecessary bulk of excessive safety systems and unused capacity.

2. Ownership changes: municipalities will buy fleets of cheap mass-produced pods to replace extremely capex intensive public transport.

3. What is transported changes: now you have shipping drones dropping off standardized (reusable) packages into standardized intakes. Think The Box [1] but smaller.

4. Infrastructure changes: Roads narrow, parking becomes drop-off spots, larger cafes, actual parks. Cut and cover roads multiply, leaving more space above ground for people. Cities grow 20% without getting bigger, just by obviating the need for half their roads. The blight of various parking signs and warnings to drivers disappear. People can walk about freely or ride their bikes. It's quieter. The air quality improves.

5. Housing changes: Garages transform into rooms. People ditch bulky refrigerators in favor of ordering drone-delivered fresh produce in minutes. Drones deliver upstairs not just at street level. Pods become elevators. We've seen all this in science fiction... guess what the enabling technology is?

If you extend the implications of the automated movement of mass, the logical conclusion is the physical infrastructure of the city will transform to take advantage of every gain that creates. Cities dedicate 25-40%+ of their land mass to roads. In dense urban cores, 20% of their land mass is just parking spots. We can't route people-driven cars underground unless we really really mean it and build a highway. We waste a huge amount of space on transportation. We also shape all of our buildings around the constraints imposed by car-shaped objects and all their various externalities, including noise and air pollution.

My belief is that self-driving is easily the most transformative tech to hit cities since the car, and may exceed the impact that cars have had on the built world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)

> 2. Ownership changes: municipalities will buy fleets of cheap mass-produced pods to replace extremely capex intensive public transport.

Producing more small things isn't usually more efficient that fewer equivalent large things. You can't just will some "pods" into existence that are magically cheaper (per person!) than trams, trains and busses. Also, once you have a system running capex and opex aren't that different - replacing a set number of vehicles per year is pretty much the same thing as operating expenses.

> 5. Housing changes: Garages transform into rooms. People ditch bulky refrigerators in favor of ordering drone-delivered fresh produce in minutes. Drones deliver upstairs not just at street level. Pods become elevators. We've seen all this in science fiction... guess what the enabling technology is?

My prediction is that no one will ever be fine with the amount of noise a "drone" (read helicopter) makes, especially as a replacement for the very noise-free and orders of magnitude more efficient elevators we have right now.

I can't imagine any of that since it relies on >99% of cars being self-driving whereas currently <1% are. Even under the most optimistic estimates, how many decades would it take to get to that? 5? 10?

> Self-driving vehicles give us the opportunity to rethink almost all of our physical infrastructure and create way more human-friendly cities.

Ok, that's just giving me a stroke. We already have that. It's called public transport, walkability, bikeability. These have the upside of being extremely well understood and use technology that's available today. We could start seeing benefits within a few years, not decades.

Even in your dream scenario, 50 or so years from now, cars would still have a lot of the same downsides they have today of using way too much space and causing way too much pollution per person for the utility they provide.

> A city-wide transportation utility obviates most of the need/desire for individual car ownership.

chuckles Yes, yes it does...

It is interesting that you raised the high cost of free parking. And we are talking about Waymo and San Francisco!

SFMTA article: San Francisco Adopts Demand-Responsive Pricing Program to Make Parking Easier

Ref: https://www.sfmta.com/blog/san-francisco-adopts-demand-respo...

Some nice analyses of the most expensive places to park in SF with demand responsive pricing:

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/sf-most-expensive-parki...

https://sfstandard.com/2023/10/01/parking-meter-san-francisc...

> Lack of smaller cars is mostly a cultural issue, not a technical one.

And an economic/tax policy issue. Some increases in size are due to legally mandated safety features, while even more of the increased adoption of SUVs in the US is indirectly due to the CAFE standards.

> I can't imagine any of that since it relies on >99% of cars being self-driving whereas currently <1% are

Technology famously has a linear adoption curve, and convenience is famously not something that drives adoption /s

> We already have that. It's called public transport, walkability, bikeability.

Do we have that though? In the US, mostly not. So what's the path? Hoping that sprawled out cities somehow magically get the political will to build $billions in light rail? What do you think is the path of least resistance to these goal states?

> Even in your dream scenario, 50 or so years from now, cars would still have a lot of the same downsides they have today of using way too much space and causing way too much pollution per person for the utility they provide.

Read other comments, don't get stuck on the notion of 'cars' as-is.

I live carless in NYC and primarily use a mix of public transit and cycling. That being said, infrastructure costs so excruciatingly much in the US that it would cost tens or hundreds of Waymos (company, not individual car) to replicate an NYC subway-tier system in most American metropolitan areas.

Forcing people to take public transit that is any worse than NYC subway will definitely and rightfully lose an election for that party. Building such a system at modern American construction costs will also lose an election. What is left to do but embrace autonomous driving as the first step toward retrofitting American cities to be slightly more people friendly?

Besides, this is the decadent west, we can afford for people to use more resources for more comfort. Even the well off in china have embraced cars as mobile living rooms.

Agree to disagree about economies of scale, but FYI busses are ~$500k and seat ~40, meaning ~$12.5k/person. There are a dozen manufacturers of electric 2 seaters today that can build for a quarter of the cost per person, or half if you assume 1 person occupancy. Yes the area per person is larger (tho not by much), but you can make up for that with increased throughput by way of point-to-point operation without stops, faster speeds, and more.

Focusing on rollout, municipal light rail almost never gets deployed in US-style cities due to huge capex, not opex. Smaller vehicles allow incremental roll-out and can use preexisting road infrastructure. Ergo, that's the form of public transit you're most likely to see grow over the next decades.

Drone here doesn't imply flying, it's about scaling down wheeled vehicles and the coexistence of a wider variety of vehicle sizes on roads that is unlocked by the automated movement of mass. Delivery to higher up floors can be done through small in-building elevators. If you think that's unrealistic, consider that it was once extremely popular to use pneumatic tubes to send mail in buildings. Built infrastructure changes based on what is possible, and mass needs to move.

You missed a critical (last?) step in your reasoning: The reason we have massive spread is because most humans want as much living space as they can possibly acquire and our laws and social norms reflect that.