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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, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday March 13 2019, @09:02AM
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.