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from the I'm-sorry-Dave,-I-can't-do-that dept.
[...] some experts believe as much as 95% of passenger miles could be electric, autonomous by 2030, thanks to some basic economics. Because electric vehicles cost a whole lot less to drive and maintain—but more to buy—and because autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the cost of commercial driving, a combination of the two technologies will make autonomous Transportation as a Service exponentially more cost competitive than either owning a car, or hiring a car and driver. It's also exponentially more profitable for car companies, who have long feared the loss of maintenance and service profits associated with a transition to electric cars.
This question will come up more frequently as self-driving technology advances. Will perfection of that technology make a difference, though, in the face of social behaviors that have been deeply ingrained over the past century?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:36AM (5 children)
Hate public transport.
And what people miss is that public transport is NOT set up to do some things:
1) Your weekly shop. This consists - in my country at least - of driving to a supermarket, loading up the boot. You can't do that on public transport.
Though you MIGHT be able to do that in a hired car (which is what any automated vehicle essentially is), you certainly can't do it on a bus or train.
2) Occasional shopping. Christmas, birthdays, a new bin for the kitchen, you can't drag some stuff home and if you say "delivery" it means that you wouldn't bother to go out in the first place.
3) Unscheduled trips. Sod having to do everything by even a London bus/Tube timetable.
4) Things in out of the way places. I go to boot sales, to people's houses who don't even have a postcode, let alone a bus-stop, to pubs in the middle of nowhere not served by a public route.
Some of those things can be done in an automated car, but none of them are practical on existing public transport.
In an automated car, however, I have to book, wait for it to arrive, go do that thing, hand the car back in some fashion.
With my car, it's just there. Jump in, go. My power went out last week. Once I realised it was going to be out for a while, I jumped in the car and in 10 minutes had visited three hardware stores to try to rent a generator. You can't do that in a demand-hire-car.
Also my car costs less than 50p a mile, purchase, fuel, tax, testing and maintenance included. Good luck getting that price on any public transport route longer than half a mile, or in any hired vehicle whatsoever. Once you take into account things like membership fees, even things like Zip cars can't compete with that. And I get a "free car" for that price (i.e. the car gets paid for and I own it outright within a couple of years, at which point per-mile prices plummet and the car has an inherent value I can reclaim if I want to). I don't get anything for hiring a car beyond the journey I wanted.
Automated cars as a service industry have uses, pretty much on par with demand-hire vehicles now, and taxis. Beyond that they are niche and public transport will still be required and used, and personal transport will still be required and used.
All of those are more expensive than owning and running your own car. Whether that car is petrol, diesel or electric. In fact, making it electric makes any other type of hire unable to compete entirely. Price per mile plummets with an electric car, or even a hybrid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @01:13PM
I dunno. I certainly lived for a couple years (in the US) with no car -- and I didn't do the whole shopping every day or two that's apparently popular in some European cities. I went shopping once a week, sometimes less, with a bicycle and a sturdy duffle bag. I packed my groceries in the bag, put the bag on my back, and rode home -- every week. I could certainly have taken a bus or train with that load of groceries, or even more. (But this was a typical US city, so there were no trains, and the bus routes would actually require you to walk a mile, take two buses (with a 25-minute wait at the changeover), and generally turn a 1-hour shopping run into a whole afternoon wasted.) If someone needs more groceries in a week than he can hump on his back, perhaps he should attack the problem from both ends by eating less?
And yeah, I realize you might be shopping for several mouths. But since you stated it as "Your weekly shop", not "a family's weekly shop", I think it's fair to point out that a properly routed and scheduled public transportation system really can handle this for quite a lot of folks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @01:38PM
That's what taxis are for.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday July 26 2017, @06:38PM (1 child)
How quaint. I select the things that I want in an app or on a web site, and the shopping is delivered to my house. The combined time of both the ordering and putting away the shopping takes less time than driving (one way) to the nearest large supermarket. For smaller things, I'll pick them up at one of the small shops on my cycle home. All of the major supermarkets in the UK deliver, though I use the one that doesn't have a brick-and-mortar presence.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 26 2017, @08:19PM
That's sort of the other end of the driving picture that most of the other people in the thread have been missing: how many of your necessary trips are still necessary? The "Retail is dying" headlines have really proliferated this year thanks to Amazon, FreshDirect, BlueApron, and other online services. As your post pointed out, that takes care of a swath of "necessary" trips that are no longer necessary.
Even in the suburbs I loathe getting in the car to go anywhere to buy anything because the traffic is prohibitive and the driving culture is appalling. And after you've battled through that and gritted your teeth as the 10th asshole in a row has cut you off, you get to the store staffed by people who don't know why they're there, what they're selling, and don't care; plus, the thing you want is not in stock or it's twice the price that you can find online. So why subject yourself to that entire exercise anymore at all if there are alternatives? Alternatives there are.
Beyond that there's the larger effect of Peak Stuff. How many tvs do any of us really need? How many pairs of shoes? Do the extra 10 outfits that will go out of style before you ever get around to wearing them all once really make your life so much more fulfilling? When the cost of all that is endless debt slavery to credit card companies/banks, is it really worth the stress and loss of freedom and health that come with it? If people decide they do not need to do those things, then that is another "necessary" trip in a car avoided.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday July 27 2017, @02:13AM
The real thing about public transport is that public transport in the US intentionally doesn't go to some places.
As in, if you look at a metro area, it's not uncommon to find areas of the cities where no buses or subway or light rail lines go anywhere near. And there's a reason for that: If the public transit board suggests putting in a route, the residents will stomp and scream in opposition. When you ask the residents why they don't want public transit service to their neighborhood, they'll tell you that they're worried about the kind of people that the new route will bring to their area.
In other words, it's a method of enforcing racial segregation in American cities.
My experience using public transport is it's fairly pleasant, all told: I get to sit there reading a book, and then I get to where I'm going. And that's been true in Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and my own fair city of Cleveland.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.