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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)
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 12 2019, @04:50PM
It's more like Quick, I gotta publish something sensational to advance my career otherwise I'm never going to be able to pay back my student loans!
It's kinda hilarious. Well, darkly hilarious. Pretty much all the complaints conservatives have about academia are caused by attempting to do science with a capitalist funding model.
Not that I ever expect it to change, not in my lifetime anyway. This 1k-2k year cusp of humanity has been really impressive all in all. A handful of humans for a brief decade or two were even living off-world (even if just in LEO). But there's really only so much that can be accomplished at each cusp.