[joe_the_user]

No, indeed the roads don't have that capacity.

I was being a bit facetious above and aiming to show the multiple contradictions that seem to be in play in the idea that self-driving cars could solve the interlocked high-rent/absurd-commute problems.

I mean, sure, maybe the final absurdity is going to be a mass of people telecomuting from the back of their self-driving RVs as these inch along in some random location but maybe the complex will fall to pieces before this.

[xocyabencl]

Believe it or not, I experienced the non-self-driving version of that scene. It was the mass of vehicles heading from the eclipse festival to Burning Man a few months ago, a block of traffic puttering along at 30 mph all day while passengers sat on their laptops.

[seanmcdirmid]

If all cars were self driving, road capacity could be optimized by 2-3X, at least (they could move smoothly bumper to bumper). It won’t happen in the states first, but highly contested Asian cities in autocratic countries sure.

[joe_the_user]

A. References for a claim a self-driving car could navigate that much more efficiently. As far as I know, current self-driving cars drive more conservatively than humans.

B. Such a claim would require all current cars off the road. How well do you think anyone could manage that? In any car-using nation, including Asia, there's a huge investment in current cars and ending that would be harder than simply introducing self-driving carts.

C. Even 2-3x the capacity can be used up quickly if people are willing to waste it and self-driving cars have much less incentive for not sitting in rush hour traffic than regular cars - which already spend a lot of time in rush hour traffic.

[seanmcdirmid]

A. Today is definitely not tomorrow. Self driving cars also don’t have any network advantages atm.

B. See autocratic country claim. China has done this before with certain cars in certain cities (e.g. breadbox vans). Japan deprecates all cars after around 5 years to make them basically unusable. Singapore has that $60k car plate thing going on that I think only lasts five years.

C. People told me LA traffic was bad. When I moved there from Beijing, I thought I was in paradise. Same with Seattle, the USA does not have traffic problems, at least relative to China; the problems are just at different scales. Also, taxi ridership is much much larger in these countries (it isn’t unusual that every other car on the road is a taxi). Enforcing self driving only on the ring roads would already be a huge win; capacity is easily controlled already by plate lotteries.

[joe_the_user]

Sure, a sufficiently strong state could impose a sane and efficient commuting system in some fashion if it chose to.

That would require some central control for whatever resources the transport system use (road, car position, etc).

Just about all the profit centers for cars and transport today hinge on entities that just control some parts of transport - so prying loose their hold would be quite a challenge. We shall see.

[seanmcdirmid]

That is incredibly American centric. There is plenty of diversity in the way things work in the world. It will only take one country to use self driving cars as an economic advantage (by optimizing infrastructure investments) for the other countries to follow to keep up their competitiveness.