[oconnor663]

Ha. Though my guess is, once self-driving is reliable enough to do that, the economics of car ownership are going to flip completely. It won't make sense anymore to have a car that spends most of its time sitting unused in your garage.

[romwell]

Imagine, now, that self-driving combined with Uber pool, so that people who need to get from and to the same destinations at the same time (as is typical for commutes) would be able to share the ride.

Imagine then making those vehicles larger to enable not only a decrease in traffic, but an increase in housing density, local infrastructure in walking distance, and economic growth.

Imagine if we then realized we could charge that elongated car as it's driving if we put electric lines above streets.

Oh, and why not increase rolling efficiency while we're at that, and make the task of self-driving simpler by embedding signaling infrastructure into the road itself.

You just imagined buses, trolley buses, and streetcars respectively.

Which is what makes the most sense, and will continue making the most sense for vehicles that don't sit in your garage most of the time.

There's more to car ownership than being able to get from A to B in principle.

Once you add immediate availability, individual vehicle preferences, having your stuff in the car already, the ability to keep your stuff there once you arrive at your destination, never having to think about small, but normal usage damage (especially if you have kids), or, conversely, having the vehicle just as clean as you want it...

...you will see that garages aren't going anywhere any time soon, self-driving cars or not.

And that we'd be wise to develop actual public transport infrastructure for the people who really do only care about getting from A to B, with some acceptable wait time. It's a win-win for everyone.

My pessimistic prognosis is that the development of the self-driving car will make the taxis slightly cheaper, but instead of paying your Uber driver, you're going to be paying engineers, maintenance, and cleaning staff.

[ljm]

Imagine how different the US would be if it was Big Public Transportation that lobbied to have towns and cities designed around them, rather than the car industry. Walking, cycling, buses, trams, trains, etc. etc. You'd still have cars but they wouldn't be a basic need for survival like they're often treated as, because you can't get anywhere without one.

Because it was basically 100 years ago when the car industry sought to dismantle that infrastructure, and succeeded.

[asdff]

To be fair it wasn't some conspiracy. The reason why people began using the car 100 years ago was that the car was becoming widely available and it was super convenient even in the days when roads were caked in horse manure. Even in the peak of the streetcar era, the private car was the best way around town, and as more people bought more cars, it continued to dominate as the streetcar would be bogged down in traffic just like a bus today. Intercity passenger rail also didn't stand much of a chance against the convenience and speed of the jet age.

[ljm]

There was _a_ conspiracy, or at least Wikipedia refers to it as such: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp....

That is to say, there's enough there to suggest that this wasn't the free market answering solely to consumer demand.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Regardless of whether or not there was a conspiracy, I think the last 100 years of private vehicle ownership in the US have shown that solely due to the convenience, it would have happened anyway.

[ljm]

I don't think that follows, because you have to prove that car ownership would have increased the same way without any intervention by car manufacturers. You're treating it as a foregone conclusion.

If you follow the same 100 year trajectory in other countries, then you will see an uptick in car ownership for sure, and infrastructure adapts to support this (highways/freeways/motorways), but it's not nearly as drastic as it is stateside.

Of course, the US is a large place and even its states are larger than other countries. And it hasn't existed in its modern form for more than a couple of centuries whereas the civil infra on the other continents has been around for at least a full millennium and most likely longer than that (e.g. Roman roads in the UK that would date back well over 1000 years). So the US got the luxury of a blank slate and, well... see what you got from that.

At the same time...car manufacturers had the perfect opportunity to seize so they could sell more cars and thus have civil infrastructure designed around the fact that everyone has a car. If someone at that point in time had more money than Henry Ford they could have dumped it into trams and trains and the landscape would have been significantly changed.

[the8472]

A bad equilibrium is still an equilibrium. That is not evidence that there aren't better ones.

[TMWNN]

The article explains why there actually was no conspiracy.[1]

[1] No, kids, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? isn't real history

[romwell]

I mean, is it really a conspiracy if open and unashamed corruption was the modus operandi at the time.

When there's funding for highways but not rails, the results are unsurprising. The benefits of public transit are a positive externality[1][2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Positive

[2]Real history is way worse

[fallingknife]

The fact that Uber is so popular even though it is more than 10x the price of a bus shows exactly how much people want to ride buses.

[HideousKojima]

An Uber (or personal car) also has the advantage of being able to take an alternate route. I used to work on the west side of Capitol Hill in Seattle and lived on the east side of the hill. Any time something like Hempfest or Pride was going on, it literally became faster to walk home than take the bus. If I was driving I could have taken an alternate route and gotten home in a fairly reasonable amount of time.

[romwell]

Are you kidding me? What buses?

There's no public transport in the US, aside from a few exceptional places like NYC, Seattle, Boston (maybe), and, like, DC.

Uber is so popular because it actually allows you to get from A to B, for some money.

But I love the circular logic of "nobody wants the buses, why fund them" — "you can't get anywhere on a bus, why fund them" — "look how few people ride the bus" etc.

[ASalazarMX]

Imagine calling a self-driving taxi that doesn't know someone puked on the back seat.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

People keep saying this, but I don't get it. The majority of your possessions spend most of their time sitting idle. Even if I just look at the higher value ones: my riding lawnmower gets used for a couple of hours every few weeks, my garden tractor/snowblower even less frequently, then I've got a trailer, a truck, miscellaneous tools, etc.

I could rent every single one of these, but don't because the economics don't make sense, and the use model would otherwise lead to a lot of inconvenience.

[angry-sw-dev]

The lynchpin in these arguments is that you'll somehow be able to summon a vehicle on a moments notice and all your usage will still be less expensive than personal ownership. The cost will be low because no humans are involved...

Except it didn't work for ZipCar or the rental agencies that have added hourly options -- sure it's not bad, but is it really pushing people out of car ownership? No...

Ride sharing similarly hasn't worked to push people out of car ownership either -- it's just killed traditional taxi services by compensating drivers less and eliminating the flag down monopoly some cities have maintained (a taxi medallion in Boston/NYC used to be worth hundreds of thousands... no one wants them now)

All these share options work for low use scenarios like the city dweller who wants a weekly trip to a shopping center, but for the daily commuter/driver it won't ever make sense... and it'll never make sense for those that need to keep things in their car like child seats, diapers, a walker, tools, etc...

Bike/Scooter shares haven't eliminated personal ownership either because of the scarcity issue at peak times.

[ghaff]

My observation in that all of these things (plus delivery services, Amazon, etc.) can make a difference at the margins. If someone doesn't have a daily commute (or has a reasonable transit or bicycle/walk option) and otherwise isn't transporting themselves, other family members, home improvement stuff, etc. on a daily or near-daily basis, collectively they may let a household do without a car (or at least a second car).

A couple I know in SF don't have a car but they seem to make a lot of use of cars in some form or other pretty regularly.

[spicybright]

Not to mention, do you really trust 20 strangers to treat your possessions as well as you do?

Have these people never been in the back of a taxi, or any kind of public transit?

[oogali]

I've pretty much abandoned Zipcar for this reason.

In the early days, it was great. But once membership increased, there was an increasing chance that I would get a car that was not particularly usable.

Filthy on the outside (dirt, mud, etc) and/or inside (dog hair, bodily fluids, etc).

Or a car that had one or more warning lights illuminated (check engine, brake, no wiper fluid, low gas, etc).

And each time I had to phone into Zipcar support to report it (and/or swap cars), otherwise the next user could report it -- leading to me being charged some cleaning fee or such.

The best experience I had was in Seattle when I entered a dirty Zipcar and called support who said I had to take the vehicle to a car wash otherwise they would charge me a cleaning fee.

While I understand I could have probably escalated to someone who understood the situation ("oh? you just got into the car 5 minutes ago?"), I decided it was a better use of my time to avoid short-term car rental programs altogether.

[spicybright]

It'd be a pain in the ass for zipcar, but every parking space should have an attendant to do a quick once over every time someone parks a car.

Less hassle with verifying who actually trashed it, but also if you have to stare someone in the face after your ride, you'll probably be more respectful of the car.

But really, there's just not a satisfactory solution I can think of to make me want to use the service.

[tomc1985]

It's the same crap preached by the cloud infrastructure folks trying to get everyone on a rental/sharecropping model. Ah those sweet rents

[lotsofpulp]

It depends how easily they can be cleaned of others’ odors and messes, and how often they need to get cleaned.

Presumably if the rate of mess is low enough and there are extra cars, you would just request a new one. Then they punish the person who left the mess or odor, disincentivizing them from doing it again. Probably need cameras monitoring the inside of the car.

[ghaff]

It's not so much messes. Rentals, including short-term ones, are a thing today. But rather there's a lot of value to many people to have the car that they want when they want it, leaving certain belongings in the car, having the car equipped for their purposes whether child seats or roof racks, etc.

While I honestly don't expect door to door self driving in most places for decades, a lot of people who don't use cars much probably underestimate the degree to which many people customize their vehicles. And even if they sit a lot of the time, most of the cost is often in miles, not time.

[db65edfc7996]

In a world where car ownership is limited, I can imagine that the car interiors would be changed drastically. Something like a subway car with hard plastic seats and easily sanitized surfaces.

[MisterBastahrd]

That is only going to happen for most people if the economics of car rentals are VEEEEEERRY reasonable. I am not willing to wait 10 minutes for an available vehicle every time I need to go somewhere. People who are dreaming of a day of full automation need to take this into account, because while I don't know how long the average trip by car is, I suspect that it's somewhere in the 15-20 minute range, which is impossible to match even with a fully autonomous driving scheme that can ignore things like stop lights and stop signs.

[fallingknife]

Uber now is rarely 10 minutes or more. Usually <5 if you're in a major city.

[MisterBastahrd]

I live in a suburb of Dallas and Uber is always 30 minutes plus.

[ctdonath]

Easily >45 minutes if not.

[tomc1985]

Every body says this but how many of us are going to want randos treating our vehicles like shit because its a rental?

[earleybird]

Vehicles are more than a transport service; they are also, for example, a place to keep your stuff while you run errands.