[aedron]

Uber's product is the company's stock. All of their "AI" and "self-driving" stunts so far have been transparent hype fuel that anyone with the slightest domain knowledge knows have no practical significance.

Their PR department are, as can be expected, top notch though. I especially like how they put a populist spin on their announcements, like the beer delivery (yay, beer!) and now picking up passengers with their proof-of-concept vehicles, to make it look like self-driving cars are already part of their business.

[beambot]

Or... they're trying to learn the nuances of operating with and around real customers for their actual application.

Too many tech companies (and esp. robotics ones) do their development and testing under limited conditions, and then they're blindsided by real-world realities.

Getting contact with customers early is key. It's like the old military adage: No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. In this case, the "enemy" is the real world.

Kudos to Uber for getting out there and working with customers -- it's much better than Google's autonomous cars, which have driven millions of miles and never had a single paying passenger!

[Fricken]

Ya, Uber just wants people to think they provide better service at lower prices than their competition; and the tricksters, they're doing it by working to provide better service at lower prices than the competition.

Feeling peckish? Ignore it. It's just the McDonald's corporation trying to raise the value of it's stock.

[ASinclair]

> Ya, Uber just wants people to think they provide better service at lower prices than their competition; and the tricksters, they're doing it by working to provide better service at lower prices than the competition.

The prices are lower because they're subsidized with invested money and debt.

[beambot]

> they're subsidized with invested money and debt.

So are public utilities, public resources, and all levels of government (local, state, & federal)...

[cududa]

Unless the government decides to nationalize Uber, what's your point?

[beambot]

That subsidization with invested money and debt is not uncommon, atypical, or untoward. In fact, those same instruments are used by most companies (not just startups) in one form or another. Actually, they're used by almost every entity in our economy, even individuals (ie. credit cards and mortgages). So the GP's point was moot.

[vivekd]

Nah, Uber and Lyft CEOs both said they envision a future where we don't own cars and just call self driving taxi services via app when we need them. They both envision this happening in less than a decade. This seems to be coming true, millennials have the lowest rate of car ownership and it seems to be the best explanation for why both companies are willing to bleed money to expand market-share as quickly a possible in the mobile taxi app game.

[samfisher83]

Why not use trains or buses. Thousands of cars compared to a single train seems inefficient.

[jonknee]

The age old last mile problem. I don't think anyone is suggesting getting rid of mass transit and in fact self driving cars could be the best thing ever happen to mass transit (no need to park at the train station if coming from the suburbs).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)

[sampo]

When a whole suburb is taking self-driving car every morning to get to the train, I guess someone will innovate and start offering rides in a minibus or even a bus.

[ygjb-dupe]

Nah, self driving electric vehicles with 6 seats operating on an UberPOOL model will dominate, and it wouldn't be surprising to see the UberPOOL model be extended to a subscription service as well where you simply pay a commit for the service level each month, get an included number of trips, and a further discounted on trips over that number.

Having the commit will make it maore feasible to fund vehicles that are intended for a specific area, and the pool model allows Uber to recover margin during pricing surges and users who don't want to pay the commit (after all, the discount on the fare would only apply to the portion of the pool fare ascribed to the subscribed to the passenger).

[galdosdi]

One neat thing about this (that probably won't end up making that big a difference for most people, just those few with high-mileage commutes in low traffic areas) is minivans can safely go faster on the freeway than buses.

[cfreeman]

I know Elon has talked about some sort of minibus form factor for their taxi fleet plans.

[fullshark]

They require preplanning, adherence to scheduling, take more time, and may not take you exactly where you want to go.

[koenigdavidmj]

Then add more trains until you don't need to look at a schedule anymore (every fifteen minutes at the absolute worst).

EDIT: Punctuation

[throwaway76543]

Adding more smaller trains without a fixed schedule over a broader area is exactly what they're doing. These smaller unscheduled trains are called "cars."

Running empty high capacity vehicles over a really large number of routes is immensely wasteful, much more wasteful than on-demand vehicles.

[dagw]

Standing for 14 minutes in the cold pissing rain is not fun. And that still doesn't solve the problem of getting to and from the train station.

[dagw]

And even that is ignoring how ridiculously expensive it would be to run trains every 15 minutes for the 6 people a day that have to get from West Bumblefuck to East Nowhereville.

[spectrum1234]

It's all about keeping the same user experience for most people (those with cars).

One thing much of this analysis is missing is how much more in demand commuter vans will be. Transportation will be much more hub based for both long and very short trips. A middle of the range option will fill the void, which is large. Given much of transit is pre planned with times and locations, for jobs, van use in self driving cars will be enormous.

[kbenson]

Well, since I put significant work into doing napkin calculations on this and would like to get some mileage on it, here's my comment from a discussion yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13172888).

Edit: It should be noted this was in the context of a discussion regarding ad-hoc pairing systems for carpooling/ride-sharing possibly making car travel much more efficient, possibly with vehicles that seat more (minivans, full size vans, small busses).

---

I actually wonder about this. Is it a matter of most cars being mostly empty, or is it inherently impossible to match the mass transit capacity. If we look at it as passengers carried over space required and time spent, here's how I see it:

Rail mass transit does not as efficiently use the land it's on a occupancy basis (there's not always a train on a specific square foot of track). In peak times, cars are more efficient on a vehicle basis. According to BART system facts[1], there are 107 miles of track. There are 669 cars, seating for 72 in 448 of them with each being 70 feet (with 59 of them having an additional 5 feet for a cab), and seating for 64 in 230 cars[2] (with an indeterminate car length, so I'll use the smaller listed), for a total capacity of 46,976 seated people. BART states that all cars can hold over 200 people in a "crush" load, so we'll assume 200 as the theoretical maximum, and say BART can carry 133,000 people when at peak (crush) capacity, and over the 107 miles of track, that gives us a density of 1,250 people per linear track mile, but with only 8.3% track utilization at any one time.

Cars do not as efficiently pack people per vehicle usually, but can more efficiently use the roads on a per-vehicle basis. Assuming very heavy traffic which is not stop-and-go, so perhaps 35 miles an hour average (the same as BART), and a 4-lane highway (two each direction), if each car is allowing two car lengths between itself and the car in front (slow traffic), we have approximately 33% road utilization (or 25%, or 20% depending on what you think the average space between vehicles is). Since carpooling seems to be at about 10% currently carpooling[4] (ignoring that it may be different in certain arterial routes, as we are discussing), we have around 1.066 people per car[5] as a lower bound. With an average car length of 177.2 inches[6], or 14.77 feet, we can estimate the people per mile on the highway during this time as being 604 people per mile of 4-lane highway.

Interesting take-aways for me:

While 4-lane highways may take more room than rail (not sure the actual sizes here), they are also more versatile.

If the highway bogs down below 35 mph, it's then less than the average rate of BART, and we need to start computing people over time instead of just people over distance.

BART has much more room to increase track utilization, but there is likely unaccounted for overhead here on each train. Optimal usage at current speed is one train arriving immediately after the prior one leaving, at 35 mph exact speed and 20 second stops, for a train of six cars (?) and 425 feet, that would be cars 2.42 train lengths apart, and a utilization of 29%, or roughly a 4x increase over current rates, 5,000 people per track-mile.

Cars have much more room to increase vehicle utilization. If we replaced 50% of vehicles with full size vans transporting on average 7 people each and didn't touch road utilization, we would be at an overall average of 4 people per car, and 2600 people per highway mile. Interestingly, if we somehow moved towards a system where smaller vehicles picked up and shuttled people with small amounts of sharing to bus-stations where they were sorted into smaller buses (40 people) going specific area depots, and from those depots dispersed again to final destinations using individual cars with small amounts of sharing, we might easily surpass rail transit systems. averaging 20.5 people per vehicle, but with somewhat more area used should put us close to 10,000 people per highway mile.

Of course, there's a lot of assumptions in all the numbers, and some speculation in the possibilities, but I thought it was interesting to figure out. ;)

1: http://www.bart.gov/about/history/facts

2: I know the total car numbers don't add up. Complain to BART, it's their data.

3: (66970 feet + 695 feet)/(7 * miles * 5280 feet/mile) = (47125 feet)/(564960 feet) = 8.3%

4: https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf, table 1.

5: 105,476 drove alone, 13,917 carpooled, if we assume all carpooling was just two people per car, we get person to car density by (105,476+13,917/2)/105,476 = 1.066 people per car

6: https://www.reference.com/vehicles/average-length-car-2e8538....

7: 5280 feet/mile / 14.77 feet/car * 0.33 highway mile utilization = 117 cars at highway lane mile utilization. 117 cars * 1.066 people/car = 126 people per mile of highway lane. 4 lanes fives us 604 people per highway.

[linkregister]

Replying to this one as I don't want to reply to yesterday's thread.

(numbers unrelated to yours)

1. BART track utilization at peak times is already pretty much at capacity. The typical westbound rush hour train will be waiting in the transbay tube for trains ahead of it to unload passengers at Embarcadero.

2. Seating capacity on BART is underreporting the ridership. At least 30 more people fit into each car during peak and late hours.

It's great that you dove into the napkin math and worked out your idea. I think that the notion of using many busses is worth looking into. When it comes to capital expenditure and ongoing subsidization, BART is an expensive remedy for traffic congestion.

I think the most vital part of the exercise is to examine the choke points: the Bay Bridge and Market St. Without another bridge and another level for road traffic, I don't see how the city could accommodate the extra usage from the loss of BART, van/bus use notwithstanding.

[kbenson]

> BART track utilization at peak times is already pretty much at capacity. The typical westbound rush hour train will be waiting in the transbay tube for trains ahead of it to unload passengers at Embarcadero.

I was hoping people would chime in with actual experiences. I've lived an hour North of SF all my life, but have never ridden BART. There's little reason to if you already have to drive quite a distance just to get to a station, and you only visit the city occasionally.

> Seating capacity on BART is underreporting the ridership. At least 30 more people fit into each car during peak and late hours.

30 more people from the per-car numbers, or from the "crush" load they report, which is "over 200" (and I used 200 for my calculations).

> I don't see how the city could accommodate the extra usage from the loss of BART, van/bus use notwithstanding.

I wasn't really making a case for eliminating BART, but more for where future load capacity might come from. If we already have a mass transit system the numbers show it's a very efficient, if fairly rigid solution than we should keep that and expand it as much as feasible (which likely means, maximizing current tracks, not creating new ones).

That said, a lane packed with buses is much more dense with people than even BART, so dedicated bus lanes (10+ seat vehicles) combined with a shift to ad-hoc ride sharing might do it. Getting from here to there would be hard though.

[linkregister]

Yikes. The crush load would force a change of work schedule or compel me to drive into the city.

I would love to see a bus-only lane. I wish Market St was closed to normal passenger traffic and only for busses and delivery/maintenance vehicles.

[kafkaesq]

Except they forget that people like owning their personal space -- especially if it's they need to inhabit for multiple hours in the day, pretty much every day.

And (as with the "smart home" advocates), they forget that, outside of the tech crowd - not everyone likes interacting with (and hence, being dependent on) computers for every conceivable need in their life, 24x7.

The ownerless model might work for some people -- but not too many, I suspect.

[santaclaus]

I dunno, of my friends under 35 (San Francisco and Oakland) it is rarer to own a car than to be carless. Most couples I know with cars are also single car families. In cities and the surrounding metros (which continue to grow as a proportion of the US pop) I could totally see an ownerless model working. How many Manhattan residents own cars?

[aetherson]

An important insight here is that if you and your friends already don't own cars, then moving from drivered-rides-for-hire to driverless-rides-for-hire for you and your friends won't reduce car ownership.

Clearly, in every world, the modern one and the future driverless one, childless adults in dense urban areas are the people most likely to benefit from a rides-for-hire approach. Families with children and people who live in suburban, exurban, and rural areas will be the people least likely to rely on rides-for-hire.

One interesting (though not, I think, probably overall very likely) scenario is where total car stock increases in a driverless car world because:

1. Childless urban adults use rides-for-hire, but they already used rides-for-hire and already didn't have cars. Meanwhile, they start substituting some amount of their former public transit travel for the new-cheaper rides-for-hire (so more vehicles are needed to serve them).

2. Families with children and suburban, exurban, and rural families purchase driverless cars instead of signing up for rides-for-hire, because rides-for-hire still don't work very well for them. In fact, they purchase more cars, because the driverless cars offer them more utility than their old cars did.

3. Meanwhile, a smaller number of people in relatively dense suburb do go to rides-for-hire and abandon ownership, but there are relatively few of them and the cars in their localities are relatively poorly utilized, so they don't offset the increases in vehicle stock driven by people in groups 1 and 2.

As I said, I don't think that's overall a likely scenario, but I don't think it's an insane one. I'd say 10% chance of coming about.

[galdosdi]

Indeed. Manhattan residents rarely own cars (IIRC around 20% do), and when they do it's always for some weird miscellaneous reason, these being the most common ones I've noticed:

- it's a toy (like a motorcycle or boat would usually be) or

- it's a business tool (like a sedan owned by a cabdriver or a minivan owned by a deli owner) or

- it's owned by someone who recently moved from a suburb to Manhattan and brought their car along by default (which most of the time, lasts no more than a few months before they learn the transit system, get fed up with parking, and sell the car) or

- they're a law enforcement officer or family member (because LEOs, even personal cars, usually get away with parking murder here, so from a parking perspective, manhattan looks as convenient as a sleepy suburb, to someone driving a car with the right protective LEO markings to ward off tickets)

- more than one of the above

[gtaylor]

FWIW, I'd love to get rid of our car. I don't like fueling, insuring, maintaining, parking, or driving it. I'd rather use that time and money on something else. Cars are a lot of work if you take care of them.

[ativzzz]

This works in dense areas. Much of the Midwest is very sparse. I can't imagine people dropping their cars anywhere in Texas (where I live) anytime soon, but I can't wait for my car to be driverless.

[hackerboos]

It'd be nice if we could get to the point where my self-driving car is earning cash as a taxi whilst I'm doing my 9-5.

[hackalaugh]

Seems potentially unlikely that a consumer could own and (auto-)operate a self-driving vehicle at a rate competitive with Uber & Lyft (or whatever corp.), who could purchase in bulk and have their cars operate for significantly less.

[kbenson]

On the other hand, I imagine there will be lots of locations where Uber and Lyft won't serve with their own fleet, either because it's too small, or because it's too sparse. Having a program, or a separate competitor, that allowed people to submit their own vehicles and do their own upkeep might help those areas get served. Then again, those areas might be geographically small enough that you don't need a car (depending on weather). Who know, maybe there's a long tail there which is hard for the big players to capitalize on completely, given they need fleet servicing facilities if they are running their own cars.

[usrusr]

If the robocab revolution happens, a lean ride broker where local community pools can offer spare capacity, within well defined availability goals for their members could be the Uber killer. Or Uber itself could be exactly that, given their roots in the claim that their drivers were not taxi operators but just ordinary people who occasionally give someone a lift for money in the cars they own primarily for personal use.

[linkregister]

Yes! The far suburbs of Nashville aren't going to see UberTeslaWaymo fleet cars; the utilization would be far too low. They'll see what they see right now: one or two drivers on Uber or Lyft. And the trip price will be higher to reflect the human driving the car.

[kbenson]

Well, with respect to the topic of this thread, those are specifically the jobs which people might purchase the car and sub it out to a company for a shared profit. If the cars are autonomous, there's no need for the driver to be there. It could become the equivalent of a paper route, and extra way to make some cash on the side during what are traditionally non-work hours (in this case, the cleaning and mechanical upkeep of the car).

[usrusr]

Cars deprecate by mile as much as by year (ignoring the initial drop which is only based on a non-zero preowner count instead of time or distance). So unlike a driver, who is as expensive while driving as while waiting, a robocab spending much of its time on cold standby would not require a terribly high premium on trip prices.

Adoption in the suburbs will still be much slower, but mostly because unused car storage is so much less of a headache out there.

[pm90]

That's only if you think that people are 100% OK with using a random car every time they want to travel. I think they would be willing to pay a little extra to own a car to keep their stuff in at all times (e.g. I always leave my Sunglasses in the car)

[hsitz]

Using a random driverless car will be much cheaper than owning (perhaps roughly as expensive as taxis would be if there were no taxi driver who needed to get paid). Random cars can be in use virtually all-the-time every day. The portion of costs a single passenger pays will thus be small fraction of the total costs. For a car you own, at least as it works now, you generally pay 100% of costs. So it's not going to cost just "a little extra" to own your own car; as it works now owning a car results in huge levels of waste, while the expensive item sits doing nothing, occupying a (valuable) parking space.

I suppose you could own a driverless car and have it continuously deployed as an income-producer moving other people when you're not using it. That creates a lot of additional headaches and problems, though. E.g., how to make sure it's always available whenever you decide you want it? Or, will it be safe to leave your items in the car when it's used by others? (I would guess not).

[usrusr]

As a city dweller, I would take random car over random parking spot every single time. Certainly does not apply to those who already pay a little extra for private parking though.

[crucini]

What if you apply that logic to today's cars: own vs rent?

[noonespecial]

A year after the tech is available, I'd expect a thicket of regulations and permits to emerge that make it economically unviable for anyone but a large company fielding thousands of cars to profit.

Sort of like how you couldn't open your own payment processor for the few hundred people in your neighborhood today.

[waterphone]

People in urban environments, maybe. Never going to be the case for the majority of areas.

[thegranderson]

Well... depending on who you source, the majority of people already live in urban environments. In the US, the most recent figure from the census is 62.7%, which is more narrowly defined at % of population living in cities[1]. If you count "urban areas" which includes towns and villages, it is north of 80% [2]

Worldwide, we are at ~54% living in cities. [3]

This trend seems to be continuing globally as well [4], so pretty soon people in non-urban environments may have no choice (assuming, as I do, that cars will get more expensive as they have more and better technology and are much more highly utilized due to sharing)

[1] http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33.h... [2] http://www.citylab.com/housing/2012/03/us-urban-population-w... [3] http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-... [4] https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/publications/files/wup2014-highl... (page 7, Figure 2)

[waterphone]

No choice? In rural environments, where you have to drive an hour to a small city and 3+ hours to a large city, and there are no local businesses, no one is going to be operating self driving cars for hire. Electric cars aren't currently practical in such places either, though over time that will likely change as battery and charging tech improves—but I don't see shared ownership or commodity car usage replacing ownership rurally at any point, and there will always be people living rurally. If new cars stop becoming available at a reasonable price to buy, then people will continue repairing, rebuilding and using old cars.

[hackalaugh]

Seems possible that as automation of delivery services becomes more widespread (e.g. drone delivery), and as both remote work opportunities and entertainment technologies increase, there will be less of an incentive, or at least less of a financial/work-related incentive to for populations to accrete around centralized urban developments. So the growth of urban vs. rural or suburban population rates may potentially slow in a few decades. Maybe, but probably not, idk.

[adrianN]

Luckily the majority of all people live in urban environments and urbanization is expected to continue.

[sho]

Yes, just the >80% of the population in urban centres (developed countries), >50% worldwide and increasing rapidly. Tiny market!

[jasonlotito]

I live in what's considered an urban area due to population density. But I wouldn't personally describe it as urban. I have multiple farms near my house, and on the way to work, I pass by numerous farms for a good part of the way. Be careful confusing urban with city. It's merely population density.

Regardless, Uber et. al. doesn't reach where I live. It's not an option. It's not a choice at the moment. Living in an urban area doesn't mean you are living in the city. Public transportation is a long way off from being viable out here in these urban areas.

Right now, you cannot live and work here without having a car (unless you limit yourself to very specific conditions, but that could be said for all locations). And again, this is considered to be an urban county.

[sho]

What definition are you using of "urban"?

From Wiki:

> The U.S. Census Bureau defines an urban area as: "Core census block groups or blocks that have a population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile (386 per square kilometer) and surrounding census blocks that have an overall density of at least 500 people per square mile (193 per square kilometer)."

By that definition, which would seem to completely rule out farming, I doubt you're actually in an urban area.

[rconti]

[citation needed]

I have a friend working for a major supplier in self-driving vehicle sensor tech who went to Pittsburg to learn from Uber. I imagine they at least did their homework before flying him out there.

[fudged71]

Plausible. Apparently, the driver needs to intervene 15+ times in a 30min period. Their technology seems to be way behind other companies.