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posted by takyon on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the unparktilect:-the-wheelbound dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984

Stingy driverless cars will clog future streets instead of parking

It's a nightmarish vision of San Francisco's future, like something out of science fiction: streets full of driverless cars, crawling along implacably but at a snail's pace, snarling traffic and bringing the city to a standstill from the iconic Ferry Building to Union Square.

But according to Adam Millard-Ball, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, this scenario could come to pass simply as a result of rational behavior on the part of autonomous vehicle owners. Congestion pricing that imposes a fee or tax for driving in the downtown core could help prevent this future, but cities need to act fast, before self-driving cars are common, he argues.

Those conclusions emerge from an analysis published in the journal Transport Policy, in which Millard-Ball used game theory and a computer model of San Francisco traffic patterns to explore the effects of autonomous vehicles on parking. He found that the gridlock happens because self-driving cars don't need to park near a rider's destination – in fact, they don't need to park at all.

The autonomous vehicle parking problem (DOI: 10.1016/j.tranpol.2019.01.003) (DX)


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Farkus888 on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:34AM (6 children)

    by Farkus888 (5159) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:34AM (#813183)

    This seems to assume that individuals will own their own autonomous cars. As a car nut, I own 3, even I assume most people will not own them. They will be owned by companies or collectives and shared.

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  • (Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:46AM (1 child)

    by Nuke (3162) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @11:46AM (#813187)

    They [SD cars] will be owned by companies or collectives and shared.

    How does that solve the problem ? It is part of the problem. There will be a lot of empty SD cars driving to their next pick-up point. A car with one owner will only be moving when the owner is in it, and is not part of the traffic when he is not in it.

    Even if a car is in a collective, if the user thinks they will need it again soon they could hang on to it by sending it around empty. It's not like a taxi which has a grumpy impatient driver and costs far more to hire - unless the powers that be make SD cars cost as much as taxis in which case they will not be replacing conventional cars any time.

    • (Score: 2) by Farkus888 on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:09PM

      by Farkus888 (5159) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @12:09PM (#813197)

      Because car as a service self driving cars will spend far less of their time parked, they will be off to the next customer. That means parking will be easier to find and cheaper, less demand, lowering the need to avoid it. Some street side parking could be repurposed as drive lanes making more room for the driving cars. Where I live downtown is a 10 minute drive away often with 5 minutes driving in circles looking for parking so this changes little in drive time. Other tech will change, vehicle to vehicle communications make denser parking and driving easier.

  • (Score: 2, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday March 12 2019, @01:33PM (1 child)

    by realDonaldTrump (6614) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @01:33PM (#813229) Homepage Journal

    I'm a Germophobe. And I'm very rich. I say "no" to sharing a car with strangers. Unless I'm sharing it with some beautiful, and sexy strangers -- the ones I invited for a ride. And we're partying, or working together. Fun!

    By the way, I can't wait for the Anonymous Vehicles. No more driver to pay!!

    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @06:25PM (#813404)

      if you don't like German cars, the Koreans and Americans are making good alternative options

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:09PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday March 12 2019, @05:09PM (#813363) Journal

    Sorry, but that doesn't solve the problem. It sounds like it should, but during a rush huge numbers of individual vehicles will be converging on the same spot, and they've got to be stored somewhere during the event awaiting the request to disperse the folk who gathered.

    If you split rush hours, that addresses part of the congestion problem, but it's unlikely to provide enough time for one of the vehicles to return to the dispersed location and pick up another rider to carry into the collection spot. (I'm purposely not saying "city" and "suburbs", because this is a more general problem, that also deals with, e.g., sporting events.) So the vehicles that deliver the early arrivals need to reside somewhere awaiting the dispersal event.

    A plausible scenario would be to construct huge parking structures a bit away from all reasonable destinations, and have these available cheaply. But that would work as well for individually owned vehicles as for corporately owned vehicles. The other plausible answer is public transit with multi-passenger vehicles (buses, trolleys, etc.), however these systems have repeatedly failed to attract sufficient investment in maintenance. I'm not sure that corporately owned sedan sized vehicles would fare any better if their main use was public transport.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:02AM

    by ledow (5567) on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:02AM (#813631) Homepage

    I can't think of a worse problem than millions of self-driving cars, bookable by anyone, able to be sent to any destination, on demand, for the cost of an Uber - and potentially used as automated couriers by hiring them to leave something in the boot.

    Protests, company boycotting, villages wanting to slow traffic down that drives through them, neighbour disputes, terrorism, Amazon using them for every little parcel (who cares if they have to queue for an hour to get to your recipient?).

    And you think that the companies that hire them out will be any better than the people who own them personally? They'll be having them circle the M25 around London constantly, and round all the airports, so that when people want to hire one, there's always one "nearby" - they'll stack them on residential roads overnight rather than worry about buying a commercial park to store them in. They'll program them to use up all the service-station spaces up to the maximum time allowed there, and then move on to the next one.

    Anything that saves them money in the long-run (and with electric autonomous cars, you're looking at pennies to do such things).

    Not to mention that they'll ensure it's many times more expensive to get anywhere and do anything, including lobbying for all roads to be autonomous and commercial, so that they have the market to themselves and you can't avoid them.