Quote:
Originally Posted by wburg
Why would cities be less car-choked than they are today? If you're just replacing the driver with a robot, the number of taxis would remain the same. And while the maximum speed is 25 miles per hour, the actual speed depends on traffic, so there isn't really any speed advantage over a cab with a human driver. What is the advantage of self-driving cabs?
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Self driving cabs have a few advantages over other services.
1. Compared to a Zipcar, they are more convenient, because they can drive to you, and you don't need to park them.
2. Compared to a traditional taxi, they should be both much more reliable (less waiting around to see if they ever arrive) and far cheaper (no driver to employ).
3. The advantages versus more modern taxi services which use cell-based hailing (uber, lyft) are less, since they tend to be speedier in terms of picking a driver up. But ultimately a self-driving car should be cheaper than even these services can provide.
Thus in the short term, I'd expect that self-driving cars will replace all of these services where regulation allows. Hell, Uber has basically already said that as soon as they can get them they'll do away with human drivers entirely.
The real change is they should eat into car ownership in urban households which use mass transit heavily for work commutes, but feel the need to own a car for travel between neighborhoods, such as socializing or shopping. As it stands now, it's cheaper to own a car for these purposes, even if you use it seldom.
Let's say, for example, you spend around $5,000 in a year on your Prius, between payments, insurance, gas, and maintenance. You don't commute, but you drive your car around four hours a week. The average hourly cost of your car then is around $24.04. This is a pretty high price, but in most parts of the country, the effective hourly cost of a cab service is significantly higher than this. Hence unless you're drunk, it doesn't make logical sense. You can drive much cheaper than this using a Zipcar, but it might not work for you if there are none in your neighborhood - and even if there is one it may be difficult to get access to one without advanced notice.
Self-driving cabs will change all this, provided the cost of a per-hour rental is low enough and supply is enough to get them to your house within a reasonable time. They suddenly make it a bad deal to keep a car around just for evenings and weekends. Congestion on the streets themselves shouldn't actually drop much, at least not right away, although the self-driving cars would have the advantage of having live traffic feeds.
But there will be many, many less cars parked, because the four hours of time you use a car per week now is 2% of the car's time, which will mostly be split (except maybe in the dead of the night) between other drivers. Hence we'll begin to reach "peak parking" and be able to see many lots and garages converted to better uses - particularly in central business districts.
Due to the way car demand will work however, I don't foresee hourly rentals replacing 9-5 commutes for a long time. This is a time period, after all, where car usage is at its peak, and if companies wanted to meet total supply, they'd need to have a lot of cars which sat around idle not making money most of the day. This is the reason I don't see these services completely replacing car ownership in the suburbs, and also why I don't think the core elements of mass transit (e.g., lines to a CBD or university district) will be made obsolete.