A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
That's WRONG! That's not how autonomous cars work!! They are AUTONOMOUS that mean you can get rid of (at least!) half the people and still have as many cars!
You mean have twice as many cars as necessary! Let's do it!
Cruise’s robotaxis created a traffic jam in Austin, here’s what went wrong
Unfortunately, what you end up with automation is often more of a thing than what you actually need, as surplus saturates the market even when it isn't desired. Rather than a single dedicated lane operating at maximum available capacity on a predictable schedule, you get a flood of functionally independent actors all congregating within a small area in an effort to maximize individual revenue.
Autonomous means you get more cars than there are people all contributing to the traffic that the people are looking to escape.
Agree. Transportation is a problem of flow maximisation. We won't optimise the circulation in our system if we flood it with transportation machinery instead of focusing on the people.
Ah, but congestion creates scarcity and drives up prices. So there's a perverse economic incentive to flood the system with machinery.
There is also an inventive to buy people expensive truck as personnal vehicule but I believe that people in this community are willing to look at the externalities.
You actually need about half the cars if they are public.
People wouldn't need a personal car if those autonomous cars were like taxis. Just tap a button and the nearest car will pick you up and deliver you exactly where you need to go, 24/7 from everywhere to everywhere.
It would be considered public transport.
I disagree. If you look again at the pictures, you will see that the subject is not car owners and their cars but rather people trying to move independently from their mode of transportation. If everyone is entitle to access an autonomous vehicle, then at any given point, you will need as much car as there is people. Despite the fact that some of the same people are not in a car but waiting for one. With personal car when the car is not used, it is kept away of the passage. Where an autonomous car, especially when use as public transport, will roam around town, clogging its arteries while empty.
You can reduce the problem by having the car stop for new people until its full (some countries taxies does that) but that's not how the solution is sold to us. Self-driving car is sold as a way to keep moving in a five-seated vehicle even when along and having the vehicle kept driving even when fully empty.