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