The Suburban Solution

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Suburban Solution

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

FCKGW posted:

People don't seem to be able to grasp that removing the driver from a vehicle does not fundamentally change how transit works.

Removing the driver from a car doesn't make less people take cars.
Removing the driver from a bus doesn't change how the bus operates.

Having a world with autonomous vehicles means that car ownership may go down, parking needs may change and MAYBE you can squeeze cars in tighter on the roads to alleviate congestion a bit. It's still the same amount of people in cars and busses, burning the same amount of fuel. That doesn't change.

Assuming a fleet of cars that is usable by the general public, the big changes in my mind would be:
1. Way less space is wasted storing cars, as one car can now serve many people even if the same amount of driving occurs. This is the relevant thing to this thread. As crazy suburb-hater kuntsler points out, perhaps we'll be able to see the target from the walmart without the curvature of the earth getting in the way.
2. Removing the need for (or even banning :getin:

) personal car ownership will have all sorts of positive externalities. No longer will folks have the albatross of a questionable car hanging over them, wondering if today's the day they'll be fired because the car didn't start. People will have less exposure to salesmen convincing them they can totally afford (nonsensically priced luxury car with terrible loan terms).
3. Increased vehicle safety. Not an immediate benefit until the vehicles are proven but cars are never drunk or distracted. It'll be a long road to beat humans for safety in the average case but beating them in the worst case is easy.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2016 23:31

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 22:14

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

boner confessor posted:

1) not really, because this assumes there's an even demand for car trips during the day. most car demand is unevenly distributed, so way more cars will be in use from 8-11 am on a workday than 3-5 am and those cars will need to be stored somewhere when not in use

Yeah, you still need enough to meet peak use, but that's less than 100%. Not to mention that, while they still have to be stored, they don't have to be stored in residential or commercial areas, freeing up the more valuable downtown space used for parking. Not sure at what point the additional travel time to the city offsets this, would definitely have to figure it out city by city. I'm not purporting this as a substitute for transit at all, it's certainly not.

quote:

2) car ownership won't be banned for a long time if it ever is, there are plenty of places where manually operated vehicles will still be commonplace if not necessary (rural areas, off-road driving, work and service vehicles) and car culture is still huge in america. there's going to be a lot of gearheads and other car guys who might own a self-driver for trips to the grocery store but will cherish their antique muscle cars. poor and old people who own 20+ year old vehicles will be holdouts, etc. privacy advocates who will argue against renting out the basic right of transportation to for-profit companies, etc.

and your membership to the self driving car fleet will absolutely be tiered based on a subscription package - take a look at how airlines operate. there's first class, business, coach, and some airlines even let you spend extra to join the group that gets on the plane first. there will be uber platinum with luxury cars and guaranteed five minute wait times even during rush hour, uber gold with complimentary snack and priority in the wait queue, uber silver that's the standard package where you might call your car before you eat breakfast so it arrives by the time you're done, and uber bronze which is lol if you expect to get anywhere on time during peak demand, also you get the oldest cars and there's an extra fee to put anything in the trunk

Actually banning it is like, my pipe dream, I don't think it's viable at all. (Perhaps just vastly increase licensing requirements - want to drive? Pass a strict licensure period showing you are as safe as a computer. No (not-extremely-driven) kid gets a pilot's license at 16, if you want to operate complicated and dangerous machinery, prove you can do it safely.)

Obviously I have no proposal for how to structure this fleet service, that's a big project that warrants a lot of thought. I can tell you my vision is not "like airlines", but I'm short on concrete proposals. Seeing as how everyone needs to move around and thus would benefit from economies of scale, it seems like a shoe-in for a government service much like transit is, not that that'll ever happen. That doesn't even rule out the luxury service, but an agent trying to do the most good instead of making the most profit could offer luxury service when it's not busy and restrict the amount of them available when the opportunity cost of a fast luxury car holding 1 would outweigh the added revenue that could be applied to improving the experience for everyone.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 00:28

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

boner confessor posted:

storing cars far away and short wait times for cars seems like opposed concepts. this is one reason people store their privately owned vehicles inside of their houses, when possible, rather than in a communal lot. cars would also still definitely be stored downtown because you want to have a supply of vehicles as close as possible to where demand is highest, or else you'd get a weird pre-rush hour around 3.30-4 as all the cars start flooding out of their hives in the industrial district or wherever and start filling up downtown streets. not to mention that self driving cars further perpetuates the polycentric distributed metropolis which by its very nature makes downtown less valuable as economic activity doesn't need to be concentrated in any one spot in particular, which is a holdover from the era of predominantly pedestrian modes (like your posts, lmao)

Yeah, you would have a time when all the cars file over to downtown before rush hour starts and away after it ends. Not the worst thing imaginable and it seems a lot better than leaving the cars in the middle of downtown. To me one of the major goals is reclaiming our shared space, and a huge portion of that right now is wasted on huge parking lots.

I don't think any system that still uses cars at all or even attempts to retrofit "far" suburbs is going to avoid promoting that same polycentric metropolis. Obviously we can get rid of zoning laws that prevent corner stores on residential streets and whatnot, but that doesn't matter if there aren't enough people with easy enough access to make such a store viable.

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

what statistically significant group of people are you imagining currently have a car, don't use it to drive to work, are still contributing to rush hour traffic and using up inner-city parking space during peak hours regardless, and wouldn't own a car if they could just Uber everywhere?

if this is really just down to the utopian vision of being able to relocate parking garages to slightly cheaper real estate outside the beltway (at the expense of radically increasing rush hour traffic, as now you've got all the cars travelling across town to pick up their owners to contend with too), that's sort of more reasonable but also who cares

Your conditions are too stringent. One guy going to work at 8 and another at 9:30 both contribute to rush hour traffic, but might have their needs fulfilled by the same car, which now does not need to be stored in any of the valuable space close to either workplace. The point is that the commuters don't own the cars, there's storage somewhere of a single pool of cars that is the size of the number of concurrent drivers, not the total number of drivers as it is now. The "self-driving" part doesn't really matter here, it's the same advantage a fleet of taxis has over individual car ownership.

Yes, a big part of the goal to me is to reclaim space currently used for car storage and turn it into worthwhile places that people might visit on purpose. It's a lot more than parking garages, but huge multi-acre parking lots which I'd like to replace.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 01:09

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

You can clearly tell that NYC is centered around downtown brooklyn, as it should be. :colbert:

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 21:56

Jeffrey of YOSPOS: Dec 22, 2005; GET LOSE, YOU CAN'T COMPARE WITH MY POWERS

Honestly, NYC does kind of have multiple centers, at the very least midtown vs downtown is pretty distinct and both are filled with commuters during the day. Brooklyn's is smaller but it has one as well. All of them have pretty dense train clusters on that map.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 22:21

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