…you can fit something like 3 times as many autonomous vehicles on a roadway as human controlled, so that will pretty much eliminate traffic delays as we know them…
Sure… I’ve heard that before. 
“Traffic jams will be a thing of the past.”
I think the idea of self-driving vehicles is great—it will allow old people to maintain their mobility and independence, for example
Uber and Lyft are already solving that problem.
Autonomous vehicles – fleets of them, and mostly electric – would make transportation as inexpensive as a monthly unlimited-minutes cellphone plan, according to some analysis. That’s even better than Uber or Lyft, as both are constituted now. I’m sure driverless Uber and Lyft is right around the corner, though. Which is a good thing.
I don’t disagree with you here. My contention is exactly what problem are we solving? Inexpensive, autonomous cars will only lead to more cars on the road. You ‘might’ be able to argue that traffic will become more efficient in merging and such but you still have volume issues on roadways. My concern is that inexpensive, autonomous cars are going to make traffic much worse before it gets better.
Now, if we really want to tackle transportation policy, we need a few key leaders to step up and stand up to a few key special interests, including those you originally listed.
My thesis about Uber and Lyft fleets – to use those as an example – would rest on the assumption that privately owned vehicle numbers would decline in response to the convenience of being able to order up portal-to-portal or door-to-door transportation on demand. I believe some of the analysis says that privately owned vehicles could decline by up to 75%, in the most optimistic scenarios.
And I want to believe that is reasonable. I ponder this very conundrum daily as I sit in traffic. I can’t for the life of me find a way to believe that a privately owned enterprise could make this profitable and more efficient. Again, if this approach is cheap and available, it puts more cars on the road as people will stop using mass transit. More cars = more traffic = more congestion
You ‘might’ be able to argue that traffic will become more efficient in merging and such but you still have volume issues on roadways.
Not ‘might’. The research is clear. The biggest driver of traffic congestion are freeway on/off ramps and intersections. Autonomous cars can increase efficiency in those cases by an order of magnitude. T**he caveat being that it really helps to have all the traffic be autonomous. Mixing human drivers in messes things up**. Perhaps there could be “human driver-only” lanes in the interim.
My concern is that inexpensive, autonomous cars are going to make traffic much worse before it gets better.
There is the valid conundrum that the cheaper you make transportation, the more of it you get. But creating an artificial ceiling on efficiency as a method of traffic control seems, to me, like telling “poor people” to stay off the roads so that us rich people can avoid traffic unpleasantness. I’d think there are other ways to handle that.
Your caveat is important here. I agree that 100% autonomous could solve a few problems, but we are WAY away from that. And one has to wonder if we, as a society, can every really get there. In the interim, we are talking about transportation policy that is a blend of human & autonomous.
My point is that I don’t think autonomous driving as it is most commonly discussed – privately owned, single person usage – solves much for us. Until leaders, visionaries true create hubs and multi-modal routes, then we aren’t solving the bigger issue of traffic, delays, etc. We do, most likely, solve smaller issues of carbon emissions, less collisions, etc. Those are important, but not as sexy.
My contention is exactly what problem are we solving? Inexpensive, autonomous cars will only lead to more cars on the road. You ‘might’ be able to argue that traffic will become more efficient in merging and such but you still have volume issues on roadways. My concern is that inexpensive, autonomous cars are going to make traffic much worse before it gets better.
… except that ride-sharing can become vastly more efficient and cheaper, so that volume plummets when enough folks opt for cheaper “vanpool” plans.
This is my hope. As I mention above, there is opportunity for leaders to reshape transportation policy and build hubs around key locations to increase ride-sharing opportunities. More autonomous buses, increased routes, dedicated lanes of travel–those are the missing policy links. But that’s not really what we are talking about here.
Personally, I don’t think autonomous cars will increase vanpooling. Right now there is nothing stopping people from van/carpooling. In fact, the federal government has a program vanstar where they basically give you a free van and only those who participate pay for the gas. It costs about $30/m to operate with 10+ people for a 40 mile roundtrip daily ride. I’ve worked with two communities, one with a large factory and a community college adjacent to one another, trying to bring this program to the students/employees. No interest. Tried on a different side of town, no interest.
Vanpooling/busing works in some areas but in others it is a long way off. As a society we are very tied to our own vehicle and the autonomy it provides. That is a cultural shift that has to happen before people’s behavior changes. While I am both excited and in favor of autonomous cars, I don’t see it providing that shift for a really, really long time (40-60 years)