I've read in these threads that people believe that autonomous vehicle will have two conseguences:
- diminish car ownership for households
- reduce parking lot spaces
TLDR; I don't think either will happen. I don’t own a car and use ride sharing services + public transportation. My belief is that you can optimally solve anything technologically, but human nature won’t accept ride-sharing for the reasons listed later in my post based on my experience.
(1) a lot of household may go from 2/3 cars to only 1/2, but there will be household without car that will purchase one. It will end up as a wash or a car ownership increase
(2) a consequence of (1) is that car will stay as a status symbol/play an important role in one household sense of freedom. If a lot of people still will have cars, other will want to follow (keeping up with the Joneses)
(3) Therefore, parking lots at your company site will still be needed, as this extension of status symbol and wealth will require your car to be ready to go at any moment when you finish work.
(4) Cities will be the places where ride sharing will take off, but we will see a replacement of the traditional bus and taxi service with car sharing. So a wash.
Let's look at Autonomous Vehicle Technology:
- they will only be slightly more expensive than traditional cars. Sensors are not so expensive and software can be replicated for free. No price barrier, with all the credit/leasing stuff going around
- they improve road capacity by optimally communicating V2V (vehicle to vehicle) and V2I (vehicle to infrastructure). Green light means all car in the queue will start together, no delay or buffer there. Highway will dramatically increase capacity with car driving very close to one another at a much higher speed (130 mph limit?). In short, they will decrease commuting and driving time, at least in the beginning.
- they are safer, making driving more appealing
- you can do whatever you want inside it, making your commute more relaxed and feeling shorter. You can smoke joints when weed will be legal while watching kitten video on youtube. You could eat your takeaway dinner that the car went to pick up for you before coming back for you.
- it makes driving possible for a larger part of the population that is not driving today. Kids under 14. People with different degree of handicap (blind, degenerative diseases, paralyzed, down syndrome etc). And elderly that at the moment have the money but not the health to drive. And you know what? There will be a lot of them in the future – all of us wil get to be 100 year old, with less reflexes but still want to drive around. And this with some special customization that makes sharing impossible (accommodating wheelchairs, special car commands for blindness etc).
- In cities you have the parking problem – but guess what autonomous car solve that. They bring you into your apartment at night, go park themselves outside the cities and come back to pick you up in the morning. Some cities families that don’t have a car may buy one just for the convenience/status symbol.
In conclusion, all of this will make own your own Autonomous Vehicle more attractive than ride sharing with someone. You can solve all the optimization problem that you want to couple people together for efficient ride, but in the end you will be asking them to sacrifice all of the above. And knowing human nature, no way that happens.
Disadvantages of car sharing:
I don’t have a car and already only use car sharing services. There are aspects that people are not going to appreciate:
- You have to be careful transporting pets; people after you may be allergic. My wife once, very allergic to cats, jumped in and had sneezes for all the trip. All kind of regulation regarding pets. You are very allergic and you don’t want to jump in a car where pets have been transported? You buy and own your own car.
- If it rains/snow good luck keeping the car clean for the next people coming after you. And if you are an assholes, you can leave all your McDrive garbage behind you, with half a burger dripping on the seat.
- Hygienic and health reason. Really not nice to jump in a car and behold a couple of wet tissue full of germs left near the central console. I’m not bothered but I know a lot of people that will be- they will want to have their own car.
- Odours/parfumes/etc. I don’t need to say no more.
- Sex on driving cars will be as common as it can gets, why stop in some shady parking lot and risk to be caught in the act? A wet dream for teenagers.
- People will want to do something if they are not driving. Eating, smoking, playing videogames, watching porn and masturbates and soon enough there will be camera surveilling the people inside. Maybe with loudspeaker telling people “please zip your pant again. What you are doing is an infraction of the code of conduct”. People will start feeling controlled and would want to have their own car.
- People forgetting stuff inside the car. You won’t believe how common it is. This alone will make for a logistic nightmare. People will rarely be able to retrieve their stuff. Cars will need to be cleaned up multiple time a week and you need a way for “lost&found”. All of this will make sharing less attractive for a lot of people. This is technically solvable; it just makes cars less attractive because if you forget something you don’t go in your driveway but you need to go on some pick-up center or wait until an available car brings it to you. If it happens at all since for companies will not be profitable.
- Something can happen that one car is not available as planned. Maybe it happens once a year, but is a nuisance. A tree falling down on a road. An hurricane coming and you need to leave asap. People will be annoyed by this.
So a lot of people will still commute with their own car:
Companies are not going to transform parking lots in efficient “launch ramp” capable of accommodating 100s of people coming and going. Because a lof of their people will still have personal cars and the most efficient&cheap thing to allow come and go as you please is an existing parking lot.
In some place you could finish work at different times, when they work in shift, and that could help. But what about engineering and research jobs; they love to come and go as they please. They will not be happy if you start giving them 15-30 minutes windows to leave the building. So why invest millions to transform a parking lot in an efficient ramp when you can keep your existing parking lot for that? Parking lot in bug industrial region are not going to disappear. They will be more efficiently used though, thus making for more cars on the roads.
Just my 2 millions cents