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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)

Not Just Bikes has a new video out: How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it). I have a love/hate relationship with urbanist essayists like this. On the one hand, they often raise issues that most of the time are not explicitly considered by most people. On the other hand, they tend to have a very leftist perspective, and ignore important costs, benefits, and solutions.

The video makes roughly the following arguments:

  1. If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.
  2. Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.
  3. Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).

Externalities

1 and 3 are similar problems. There are externalities that current laws don't address because they weren't huge problems given historical technology. Namely noise, tire pollution, and congestion. But new technology, autonomous cars, changes the costs and benefits of driving and will make these externalities much worse.

Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages. Bans are the same blunt tool that current laws use to force too much parking and not enough housing and bikes lanes to be built, just in the opposite direction. But he redeems himself by proposing putting a price on driving.

If you've ever heard of Arthur Pigou, a price on driving as the solution to 1 and 3 is pretty obvious. If someone really wants to drive at 4:30pm on a Friday when everyone else in the city wants to drive too, let them pay extra to be one of the people who can actually get places. There's a limit to how many people can actually get anywhere at that time, and we might as well offer the slots to the people who get the most value from it, and get some money back for public use in return. Charging a congestion fee completely solves the problem of autonomous vehicles circling the city hoping to be closest to the next customer. They have to pay the same fee as anyone else, so they'll only be on the road if they're the highest-value use of road space.

Not Just Bikes proposes investing in "functional and viable public transit", especially in forms that are difficult to remove, presumably to be able to resist transient political pressure. Of course, any publicly-run agency is going to have a very hard time running "functional and viable" transit when compared to a selfish private organization. And there's no reason a company that makes autonomous vehicles can't make and run buses as well.

A better solution is to price road space appropriately, and be agnostic to who's using the space. This allows the highest-value uses without artificially restricting to "public" or "autonomous" uses. Offer express lanes that guarantee certain speeds by limiting the number of vehicles that can enter. The entry fee is set high enough that there aren't any queues to enter. Crucial here is that any vehicle, private or public, should be able to use the lane as long as the driver pays the fee. This allows many more solutions to transit problems, without the dysfunction of publicly-run bus agencies. For example, corporate shuttles, church buses, and private rideshares should be allowed to use the same express lanes as public buses. And if Jay Leno wants to drive his personal car in the express lane, as long as he pays the fee, let him! Same goes for autonomous vehicle makers. If they want to reserve some space on freeways for their cars, make them compete on price the same as anyone else.

Putting a market-based fee on express lanes has a side benefit of making the opportunity cost of formerly transit-only lanes more legible. A few such market-based lanes can illustrate how expensive existing transit-only lanes really are.

Public Choice

Point 2, that laws will tend to favor autonomous car makers over the public, is just a specific example of public choice being a hard problem. There are analogous situations with Big Tech and the public commons, John Deere and right-to-repair, and Big Oil and climate regulations. I don't have a lot to say here, except that this has always been a problem, in other times and places has been much worse, and is likely to be manageable. People are smart.

An Aside on Congestion and Induced Demand

This video mentions the old chestnut that (paraphrasing) induced demand means it's pointless to increase road capacity. I'll quote one of our own:

Likewise a new freeway lane immediately filling up tells us there are still more people who want to be using this freeway.

If autonomous vehicles lead to people traveling more, that's good! It means more trips are now worth taking. People are visiting friends and relatives more often, working at jobs that are farther away but are a better fit for them, and in general doing more valuable things.

Conclusion

I'd like to see more discussion of the economics of transit, and economic solutions, especially without a leftist slant. But this is the first time I've seen a popular urbanist talk about the fact that self-driving cars will increase road use and congestion. This is great! This fact should be obvious to anyone who's spent five seconds thinking about the consequences of making driving cheaper, but I haven't seen it mentioned much outside rationalist circles. This point alone makes up for any other failings in this video.

As others have said, this is only an issue in dense old-world cities where a high percentage of the population use public transport already. In these cities I imagine SDCs will be taxed, banned or discouraged as necessary to avoid extreme congestion. In the US it’s irrelevant outside of Manhattan because everyone already drives everywhere.

I found this blog when I was trying to figure out what a “Soviet triangle” meant. Thought it was interesting reading. That article is about bus networks, but there are others on subway placement, throughout, all sorts of stuff.

congestion fees

Those certainly disincentivize traffic, but I’m not sure I grasp the economics. Taxing consumption reduces the clearing quantity. But the clearing quantity for roads is the supply of workers! Any intervention that doesn’t change the ratio of road usage per worker is going to affect the cost of labor, too.

So we need to ask whether self-driving cars fundamentally changes that ratio. I think it has to, right? Flawless zipper-merging. Reduced accident rates. Shorter following distances, perhaps ending in attached convoys to reduce drag. There’s a lot of room for technical solutions.

I don’t think we’ve hit the limit on people-miles per hour. Until we do, we still have room to make congestion more efficient.

I think you make a pretty important point: Many, if not most, drivers in cities don't even want to be there. They are there to get the paycheck to do the things they actually want to do. Thus any "solution" to too many people driving in the city will inevitably end up hollowing out that industrial/urban core of office buildings. We've seen this story before. This kills the city.

Pedestrian Observations is great! I don't know any better source for highlighting transit economics and (especially) instances of transit agency incompetence.

Taxing consumption should lower road usage per worker, because it makes workers more likely to bike, carpool, or take transit.

I think that we should create a CDS - car derangement syndrome, similar to TDS. To me it seems that those are the types of people that just plain hate cars and are latching on everything to make the anti car case.

I used to suffer from carbrain, and now I suffer from CDS. It's tough. I can't wait for the walk sign at an intersection without noting that the wait was caused by the cars. Whenever I see free street parking or a speeding driver, I can't help but try to quantify the untaxed negative externality. Everywhere I go in my American city, I see the ghost of the city that once was, before the cars took over the streets, and the ghost of the urbanist utopia that the city could one day become. The only thing that helps me is driving in a rural area, which feels natural, peaceful, and truly necessary.

There's an inherent scaling problem with cars and dense cores.

It becomes especially problematic because some people love driving and have a very entitled view and won't accept that investments in things like commuter rail benefit them by reducing the number of people on the road.

Commuter rail is fairly inefficient in most cities, and in any case doesn't replace the automobile. That is a large public capital investment to not even replace a lot of privately held capital.

For some people the dense cores are the problem.

Then it sounds like everyone is in agreement-- those people shouldn't be driving in the dense cores!

Commuter rail doesn't reduce traffic.

Can you expand on that?

Getting into doomer territory, ... They (the car makers) might also get public transit banned

Not sure why he's making a distinction between self-driving cars and public transit. Self-driving cars are a form of public transit. They are not private vehicles, they owned and operated in a way that's quite similar to busses. In a way, a self-driving car is just a better bus.

There are issues that are specific to self-driving cars due to their personal nature compared to conventional mass transit, which are mostly related to privacy. It's much easier to track you in your "personal bus" than it is in a bus with 20+ other people. But he barely touches on it, and also, conventional mass transit would be quickly losing much of the advantage in that respect anyway due to technological progress in surveillance technology.

This video popped up in my feed and I hated it. It's not wholly bad, but NJB is arguing in bad faith, using the good old Gish Gallop to overwhelm the viewer. Here's how I would structure a movie about self-driving cars:

  1. Adding an auto-pilot to your own car will not change the cities much, so it's not really a qualitative change
  2. To replace private car ownership with a shared pool of autonomous cars, they have to be cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. We'll examine the best-case outcome later, but here's why reaching it is a tall order:
    • it's hard to make them cheap: blah
    • it's hard to make them safe and fast: blah
    • it's hard to keep them clean: blah
    • it's hard to make the ubiquitous: blah
  3. But let's imagine autonomous cars are cheap, safe, fast, clean and ubiquitous. How will our cities be reshaped by them?
    • since cars drive at inhuman speeds, they need a grade-separated road network that excludes pedestrians and drivers
    • since they are ubiquitous, this road network has to reach all destinations to be safe
    • since they are cheap, this road network can't be built underground and will need to be based on the existing road network
    • etc.

Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers

So it seems that they are effectively "Just Bikes" instead of "Not Just Bikes", right?

I would guess they’re into light rail and even buses.

Speaking from a totally American perspective, transit mode share is already so small as to be irrelevant to the issue of congestion. The only way that self driving cars will increase congestion is through increased trips taken because the cost of driving is lowered. And considering how most people currently own a car and prepay most of the cost of ownership in financing and insurance, I don't see trips increasing that much. Being able to watch tiktok in the car instead of being stuck listening to the radio while driving probably won't increase trips all that much either.

In fact, self driving cars should save urbanism by getting rid of all those horrid parking lots and parking garages. Infill replacing surface parking will bring up density and also close the gap between existing businesses that are surrounded by seas of parking.

So let's go through the video's specific braindead arguments.

If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.

Transit share is so low that you could delete buses from every city in the USA and not notice a difference in congestion. You can even look at the EIR statements of transit megaprojects (subways and shit) in California and see that they're projected to do literally nothing to congestion. Transit is a service to increase accessibility for the car-free, not a tool to reduce congestion.

Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.

So what? This doesn't affect urbanism directly. Laws about who can sue when someone gets flattened by an idiot driver don't usually factor into people's everyday decisionmaking. The feeling of safety based on design is what matters.

Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).

It would take a monumental stretch to delete sidewalks and crosswalks. Nobody is going to call a self driving car to cross the street, and nobody sane would mandate that. The fact that (granted, inadequate) crosswalks exist in even the most mind-numbingly car-dependent, zero-transit suburbs means that we as a society understand the need for these things even when almost nobody uses them. Regarding noise pollution, nimbys exist, and will obviously be able to limit vehicle speeds for the sake of noise.

I wouldn't put too much stock into environmental impact statements. Their methodology for predicting traffic is often suspect; for instance, the draft EIS for the I-5 project between Portland and Vancouver, WA expects the same number of cars per direction on the I-5 bridge whether or not the bridge is expanded.

You could not delete buses from every city in the USA without noticing a difference in congestion. See this study about a 2003 LA transit strike, which saw average highway delays increase by 47%. Then consider that LA has a much lower transit mode share than some other US cities.

You're right that transit isn't a good tool to reduce congestion. (At least, I think you're right; I'd have to do more research to be sure.) That's because road space is almost always provided free of charge. It's rational for drivers to fill up the free road space until traffic delays make it too inconvenient, and if transit siphons off some of those drivers, other drivers will fill in the gap.

But the purpose of transit isn't just to increase accessibility for non-drivers. It can also convert drivers into non-drivers, and it can enable drivers to forgo driving when parking is too expensive or traffic is too bad. (E.g. going downtown, going to sports games and concerts, or going to the airport.)

Transit share is so low that you could delete buses from every city in the USA and not notice a difference in congestion.

It's been noticed that congestion sometimes goes DOWN during transit strikes in Philadelphia. Some of this is likely reduced trips, but the claim that buses are basically cholesterol in the road system is out there.

In fact, self driving cars should save urbanism by getting rid of all those horrid parking lots and parking garages. Infill replacing surface parking will bring up density and also close the gap between existing businesses that are surrounded by seas of parking.

Except all the cars in those lots are now on the road, with nobody in them. The streets are the new parking lots. This wouldn't be a good thing.

Or they could park further away than their occupants are willing/able to walk....

There would likely be a lot fewer of them. Instead of owning a car people could use cars as a service.

Discussed below. I think this is unlikely given that Uber has not reduced car ownership at all.

Instead of owning a car people could use cars as a service.

No, because of the peak load problem. A very significant percentage of those cars get used all at once.

If autonomous vehicles lead to people traveling more, that's good! It means more trips are now worth taking. People are visiting friends and relatives more often, working at jobs that are farther away but are a better fit for them, and in general doing more valuable things.

I think it's it's just that, car travel has pretty large negative externalities in terms of pollution, parking spaces that need to be allocated, and injuries / deaths due to accidents, compared to other modes of travel. So while more people getting to travel where they want to go is good, many of those trips are outweighed by these negative externalities, and essentially make life worse overall. Other forms of travel also have negative externalities, but they're much less severe than car travel.

Big cars are a bigger threat to cities than self-driving cars. The heavy weight of these huge SUVs and trucks causes more wear and tear on roads, higher hood means more pedestrian accidents, longer length means fewer parking spaces and more congestion, bigger engine means more noise and pollution, etc. So many externalities. If everyone is driving cars that are 50% bigger it means it's like 1 extra car for for every 2 people.

I'm not very enamoured with the idea of sitting down and listening to a video essay from someone that I would likely dislike to the extreme. It's times like this I come back to my ever-increasing frustration over the lack of these sorts of people not including thier actual arguement typed out, in a proper essay, so I can actually sit down and read the damn thing.

Ahem.

I mention this to put my biases up front, and I will trust that what you state is the general gist of the video essay.

That said...

causing noise pollution

This is where I can only stare and wonder if these people actually function and operate in the real world. Large-scale interstate travel already happens through what's basically suburban areas. This is already a problem, and solutions can be very obvious - just build a goddamn wall.

As for

increasing congestion

Assuming a perfect solution - or, let's say, good enough solution for self-driving cars where thier tendancy to get into a wreck is lower than a human driver - the likelyhood is that, despite the increased usage, congestion will go down explicitly because computer-derived control will allow for smoother flow and volume management.

If you follow the logical conclusion of the above, this is even better - you can have the luxury of your own personal vehicular conveyance without the need to actually park it nearby your destination! Simply roll up, get out, and tell your car to either keep driving or find the nearest parking location. Tap a button on your phone, summon your car to wherever you ended up. All of a sudden, the need for immeadiate parking is killed, and the state mandated and required need for parking that drives current urban development has no leg to stand on, and we can all go back to the wonderful idyllic standard of walkable town centers of the early 20th century. Yay.

As an aside, I've worked in one of these areas before - they're honestly, surprisingly nice in alot of ways that aren't immeadiately obvious, so I can understand why people are so enamoured with them. That said, I can't help but feel that alot of people forget the time, place, and context in which these places were built.

And yes, the above is making a large number of utopian assumptions that I honestly don't beleive we'll ever get, but hey, I could be wrong...

All told, I tend to have a very dim view of people like this; they blatantly ignore the potential benefits and instead have a singular goal; get rid of cars, whatever the cost, regardless of the potential benefits.

If you follow the logical conclusion of the above, this is even better - you can have the luxury of your own personal vehicular conveyance without the need to actually park it nearby your destination! Simply roll up, get out, and tell your car to either keep driving or find the nearest parking location. Tap a button on your phone, summon your car to wherever you ended up. All of a sudden, the need for immeadiate parking is killed, and the state mandated and required need for parking that drives current urban development has no leg to stand on, and we can all go back to the wonderful idyllic standard of walkable town centers of the early 20th century. Yay.

NJB's video is terrible, but he makes at least a couple good points:

  • you'll still want your car to arrive quickly, so this means that at rush hour cars will have to drive downtown en-masse and either find some parking or keep driving around the block
  • while you won't need a parking space next to your house, the demand for roads will only increase: instead of having to use a school bus or their parent's car the kids now will be able to drive to school, to the mall, to their friend's house etc.

This would be solved by introducing a huge amount of Cars-As-A-Service. I believe Elon has already published this idea on the Tesla website.

The idea would be that very few people outside of enthusiasts actually own a car. Everyone else simply pays $50/month (or whatever the price point is) to have on demand access to a Tesla. It's not an uber pool where you share, it's a private car that carries you to/from anywhere even if that anywhere is very far away. You get it in, get to your destination, get out, and the thing just flies off to whomever needs it next. Utilitarian all the way, no "joy of driving" here.

This would do a lot in the way of reducing the need for parking across the board in urban centers because most of these cars would never actually "park" in the sense we think of today. If they aren't moving to serve customers, they're self-refueling or limping back to some sort of service factory for repairs and what not.

The couple tradeoffs I can think of;

  1. People still want to own cars because cars are emotional attachments and status symbols. They're number 2 in this category besides houses.
  2. Privacy issues start to become far more real. 100% chance trip telemetry - associated with an account that includes some sort of identifiable info - is constantly logged. A car is downstream from a horse and a horse = freedom to move. The price and convenience tradeoff is for the customer to make - unless human piloted cars are banned from urban centers. And this is the complexity of the system; for it to work, there may be a fundamental personal choice tradeoff. That's the harder barrier to overcome. Noise pollution etc. are all details that can be worked out later.

As someone without a car living in a city with functional public transport, a big feature of cars I'm envious of is their function as a mobile personal space. A car doesn't just get you places, it's a tiny room you can bring with you. People frequently use this as both temporary and permanent storage, and imo there are emotional benefits to spending your commute in a place that's yours.

Losing this is by far the biggest tradeoff I see.

I used to have the same view, but then I started traveling more. My backpack is now my mobile office and it works fine.

It is a tradeoff, I acknowledge that.

I guess this is also one of those things that are affected by how well you can do laptop work in a moving vehicle. I can work even while riding shotgun in a car if necessary, some people can't even do it on a train. A major factor for me to not own a car; train trips can actually be useful in themselves for doing work with limited opportunities for personal distraction.

I already addressed this, but, aside from economic concerns, the biggest downside to this idea is that it would massively increase traffic. With few exceptions, cars only contribute to traffic when someone is actually trying to get from Point A to Point B. When I drive to work, I'm creating traffic between my house and my office, but after that my car is just sitting in the parking lot all day. If cars are a service I'm start creating traffic as soon as I summon the car, which now has to get to my house from wherever it is. And once I get to the office it's unlikely that there is going to be anyone here who happens to need a ride, so it now has to create more traffic while it either finds a passenger or heads back to home base.

Now consider a typical urban rush hour. All the cars that would normally just disappear into garages for the day are now driving around looking for fares. Or driving back out to lots in the suburbs. Now, in addition to the typical morning rush, we have to contend with a corresponding late-morning rush that consists entirely of empty vehicles. Imagine what it would be like if even a quarter of the cars that are currently parked were out on the street and you have an idea of what this would be like.

And once I get to the office it's unlikely that there is going to be anyone here who happens to need a ride

In a dense urban center, someone is always going to need a ride.

All the cars that would normally just disappear into garages for the day are now driving around looking for fares.

Well, no. They are only in motion if they have a fare already - this is what an algorithm would handle. Uber drivers have to roam the streets and try to chase the surge because they're humans earning a wage. With a fleet of autonomous vehicles, the unit economics of one particular vehicle don't matter, it's a very straightforward supply/demand matching algorithm at the broad market level. You'd end up having waves of fleet movement at something like a Metropolitan Statistical Area level.

Now, in addition to the typical morning rush, we have to contend with a corresponding late-morning rush that consists entirely of empty vehicles.

What does "contend" in this context mean? If I'm in a driverless car, I don't car about much more than travel time. I can doomscroll, or work on a laptop, listen to music, zone out, or, given a long enough trip duration, just recline the seat and go to sleep.

In a dense urban center, someone is always going to need a ride.

If the demand for rides out of the urban center (in the morning) were as high as demand for a ride in, then we'd already see equal movement in both directions.

Well, no. They are only in motion if they have a fare already - this is what an algorithm would handle. Uber drivers have to roam the streets and try to chase the surge because they're humans earning a wage. With a fleet of autonomous vehicles, the unit economics of one particular vehicle don't matter, it's a very straightforward supply/demand matching algorithm at the broad market level. You'd end up having waves of fleet movement at something like a Metropolitan Statistical Area level.

You can algorithmically optimize things all you want, but in the end, it isn't really an improvement unless the car can find a fare relatively quickly and relatively close by. If it has to park downtown for any period of time, it's spending money rather than making money, and it's likely more money than a private commuter would pay for his car since he'd probably have a lease (and the pay structures of most garages make things even more complicated and expensive). If the car drives around to find fares, picks up a fare outside of downtown, or goes to a lot where it can park for free, it's contributing to traffic. Additionally, the optimization is only concerned with losing the least amount of money when the cars don't have passengers. Minimizing traffic doesn't play into the equation.

Consider the following scenario: A downtown area gets 20,000 commuter vehicles per day, and a garage costs $15/day on average. Assuming demand to leave downtown is minimal until later mid-afternoon, the optimal move is to simply have the cars drive around downtown. Perversely, if the cars are electric or hybrid (which they are usually assumed to be), it's in the interest of the car service to create as much traffic as possible. Since the bulk of the energy consumption only occurs when the cars are actually moving, it's best for the companies to ensure that the cars are stopped as much as possible. If people need to leave downtown during the day, then, well, there aren't enough of them to make it worth it to park the cars somewhere.

What does "contend" in this context mean?

Deal with the consequences of. Sitting traffic as a passenger isn't exactly much of an improvement when you're trying to get somewhere.

Perversely, if the cars are electric or hybrid (which they are usually assumed to be)

I'll jump off from this point.

Aside from just being an Elon dream, I think a lot of potential Autonomous Cars As A Service (ACaaS) would seriously consider whether EVs are in their interest (at least in areas where the weather is such that EVs make sense at all). Per-mile energy costs tend to be lower, and I haven't kept up with the stats on current models, but there are simplicity reasons to believe that, for a given level of non-propulsive tech in a car, simply swapping out ICE for electric can plausibly reduce maintenance costs (practical numbers would definitely be needed for battery replacement on a car running taxi service every day compared to a comparable ICE). So, there are inherent reasons for the service providers to want to consider EVs.

Anyway, let's get to building a model. I'll start with the premise that we pretty much just model the vast majority of peak traffic as commuter traffic, the timing/quantity of which we hold essentially fixed. I'll also assume for now that the autonomous taxi service supplies almost all of the commuter traffic. Crucially, this model doesn't really say almost anything about the total number of cars owned or the number that are personally owned. People may still keep the same number of cars at home, in their garage all week, ready to use for the weekends, trips to grandma's, etc. I think there's a lot of confusion in the thread that is flipping back and forth between ownership and utilization. In any event, I think this model is somewhat like what you have in mind in your example.

Now, basically all of the service's EVs have presumably magically found a home to cheaply charge all night, presumably somewhere in the suburbs where it's hopefully cheap. Given the current 200-300mi range, they can basically all come online and 'work' through the morning rush hour(s). I think there are a couple crucial questions, one which you've brought up, but another which I think has been missing. First, "How much do they deadhead during rush hour?" Second, "Do they have to charge to make it through the evening rush hour? If so, what method would they prefer?"

For deadheading, the simplest model is to just to assume that there is approximately zero demand to go in the opposite direction of the main commuter traffic. To a first approximation, a small amount of deadheading has the obvious cost of driving back trading off with a reduction in the number of vehicles the ACaaS has to operate. Presumably, an ACaaS startup will have a nerd in the back room doing calculations with a more detailed model of traffic, and I think this would be a key parameter. Obviously, as you point out elsewhere, as that parameter increases, you run the risk of tipping into two-way congestion, which would also increase the cost of deadheading. But something else to note is that, in this simple model, this parameter is pretty directly correlated to the number of cars that potentially end up somewhere in the urban area through midday. That is, for example, if each autonomous commuter taxi makes one deadhead trip to pick up another commuter, and we assumed that each commuter would have brought one vehicle into the urban area, we've reduced the number of vehicles in the urban area during midday by half. It's very directly (inversely, lol) just a 1/(N+1) relation. At what value of N does two-way congestion really start to become a problem? I haven't the foggiest. Hell, it could even be a non-integer less than one; I have truly no idea.

An important challenge of this model to people who are pro-ACaaS is that they really kind of need to say what sort of N they're expecting, would be okay with, and think is plausible. Else, they need to propose something specific that the model is wrong about that can plausibly make their other claims work. If they're not okay with nonzero N, they better have something good, or we might think they're slipping magic into their imprecise model.

Of course, in the simplest model, we don't super care about congestion in the other direction except to the extent it increases the cost of deadheading. That is, the simplest model is that it was a wide open, completely empty freeway heading back to the suburb, and nobody cares if a bunch of deadheading empty ACaaS are clogging it. One would need more complications in the model to capture anything else.

N is not just limited by cost and two-way congestion considerations; it's also limited by time constraints. If an average round trip takes an hour, for example, you can't make more than a couple within the peak hours. This also leads us to the second question about charging. If you're driving back and forth for N trips for a few hours in the morning, do you need to charge to make it through the rest of your day?

EV owners typically prefer slower charging, as it's cheaper and better for the battery, reducing their lifetime costs (ACaaS operators may also have incentives to just abuse the hell out of their batteries; typical taxis certainly have incentives to abuse the hell out of their cars). Of course, if it's sitting there charging more slowly, it's not making any fares. But if it's lollygagging around in traffic trying not to do anything so as to conserve energy, it's not making any fares either. In this model, there's not many fares to be had at this time, so it's kinda dead time anyway. I think I see three options: 1) Not pay for a spot to park half of the afternoon, just eat the cost of fast charging, then hold up traffic conserving energy, 2) Pay to take up a spot for a while, but get cheaper slower charging, 3) Just drive back out of town to get cheaper slower charging without paying the spot fee.

To flesh out a hopeful possibility for (2), though, as the morning rush tapers off, they could start to duty cycle off for charging. Math would need to be done, but if you need your duty cycle to be Y% through the day, you'll have Y% of your peak capacity available. Hopefully, those nerds in the back will figure out how to get that percentage right so that you have enough charge left in enough tanks to get through the evening peak.

But then, I think the math conclusion is that, during the day, between rush hours, Y% of the autonomous taxis will be roaming for possibly cheap fares (maybe still doing bad energy conservation stuff), whereas (100-Y)% of them will be charging somewhere. So, we won't have peak rush hour quantities of cars on the road all the time throughout the day. Also, even assuming that the entire (100-Y)% of chargers are finding their charge homes in the urban area, that's plausibly still a lot fewer charging parking spaces than would normally be housing the full 100% of peak traffic all day that we currently have. Ya know, if the limit on N will allow it. The hope and promise here over individually-owned vehicles would be that you save on parking, can recoup some costs with deadheading, and even getting some fares on a duty cycle in the afternoon is worth more than having it sit in the parking garage all day while you're working.

Obviously, there are a ton of detailed cost comparisons that would have to be made. But I think that EVs are potentially different from ICEs in that essentially the only sensible model of 'charging' the latter is 'fast charging', at one given price point. I'm sure someone out there will make some models/approximations where they say, "Assume our average charging voltage through the afternoon is V," then proceed to compute duty cycles, cost of charging, impacts on maintenance, expected fares in the slow periods, cost of however many parking/charging spaces they need at that duty cycle, etc.

We'd kinda need to search out the space of at least (N,Y,V). I don't know if there will be any ranges of parameters that work for any models with real-world costs/traffic patterns/etc., and they may all end up with perverse incentives like, "Poke around and hold up traffic all afternoon." But I also kinda don't think I'm comfortable concluding that there is no range of parameters at all where it might make sense. I kinda just think we'd need a more sophisticated model. I also think the most likely conclusion would be, "It does not make sense for ACaaS to grow all the way to the point of providing all of the commuter traffic," and the model would get more complicated still, as one would have to vary the quantity of commuter traffic they think they could capture.

As a note, ChatGPT pulled a number out of its giant inscrutable matrix and estimated that traffic volumes during peak hours are often 30-50% higher than midday, rising above 100% in certain cities like NY/LA/London. I honestly have no other frame of reference in my mind to know if that's a complete fabrication or is in the right order-of-magnitude, but it could give a modeler some start in estimating plausible duty cycles (I mean, not exactly giving us Y, but maybe something like it?). Probably the simplest starting assumption would be that all of that midday traffic is entirely in the urban area, but obviously that's not "correct", and again, one would need a more complicated traffic model.

One final note is that nothing in this simple model has any dynamics. There's no, "Well, A got cheaper, so more people decided to B, so..." It's a purely static model, in line with your scenario.

This is where I can only stare and wonder if these people actually function and operate in the real world. Large-scale interstate travel already happens through what's basically suburban areas. This is already a problem, and solutions can be very obvious - just build a goddamn wall.

You can't build a wall around every road, and you don't argue that self driving cars would increase the number of cars on the road - so you don't seem to actually contradict his point here. Even ordinary non-interstate roads can be quite noisy (ask me how I know).

I assumed he was being sensible and complaining about the largest sources of high-speed cars - IE, interstate traffic. Hence, you focus your sound-mitigation efforts there.

Off interstate/highway, you simply use speed control to keep the sound down. Perfect? No. But hardly the dystopic landscape the video likely paints.

His hypothetical involves no speed control.

Getting into doomer territory, car makers might... increase speed limits to ridiculous levels

Sorry to pick out one bit in an excellent post but, since this is the internet...

congestion will go down explicitly because computer-derived control will allow for smoother flow and volume management.

This seems unlikely in the near term. Currently, self-driving cars solve ambiguous situations by slowing down. When that doesn't work, they stop entirely. Thus the phenomenon of "coning".

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/26/1195695051/driverless-cars-san-francisco-waymo-cruise

In crowded areas, drivers have to exercise a lot of agency to facilitate the flow of traffic. You have to know which rules to bend and which ones to break. In extremely dense situations this gets a lot more serious. I was in a cab recently in Latin America where we were going up a steep hill on a rainy night. The taxi, some sort of shitty Kia knockoff, was struggling to get up the hill. Suddenly a delivery vehicle parks in our lane. A car is coming in the other lane. Our driver calmly pulls into the uncoming traffic, forcing the car in the other lane to the far edge of the road. And this was the right move. Had he stopped he never would have been able to start again.

But will an autonomous vehicle do the same? What if it (inevitably) kills someone doing a similar maneuver? I don't envy the Google lawyer who has to explain to the jury that the deceased's life is nothing compared to the hundreds of man lives saved by breaking traffic laws.

I think driverless cars will have much less throughput than human driven ones. The idea of cars flying through four way stops at 25 miles per hour with precise timing to avoid collisions is a fantasy.

I did add alot of prefaces and assumptions to my argument, yes. I personally doubt we'll be seeing functioning, self-driving cars any time soon.

I think the big benefit of autonomous cars is that they are both a taxi and a valet service in one. Your car drives you to your desired place of work (for simplicity we assume the hypothetical person works in the downtown core.) It then shuttles itself off into a place where space is cheap, to charge itself. Perhaps in an old industrial zone. When its owner gets off work, it dutifully begins to make its way ahead of time, travelling in packs of five or ten.

Because there is no need for a steering column, the interior of a autonomous vehicle can be structured in a radically different fashion. The interior can be made much more luxurious, especially if it is for a single occupant! Since it's going to have an internet connection anyway, there's no reason not to do it up like a office, or put in a bed if desired. And when it drops off its occupant, it goes to another warehouse to charge. The convenience factor of not having to negotiate two permanent parking spots in a major metropolitan area is extremely high.

The increase in commute time could be greatly mitigated by the comfort factor, in my opinion.

I think that if autonomous cars are ever widely adopted, the idea that they can also be a valet service will die pretty quickly. Imagine a typical Wal-Mart on a typical day. The vast majority of people park in an available space and walk to the store, then walk back out to their car. Now imagine if everyone were dropped off at the entrance. Now imagine if everyone summoned their car to the entrance as soon as they hit the checkout line. Now imagine both happening at once, all day, every day. The road in front of the entrance would be a nightmare. Now imagine that instead of the dropoff area being a private road with a large, adjacent lot, it's a public through street where the nearest parking is blocks away, and the cheapest parking is miles away. Imagine what an already busy downtown street would look like if 500 office workers all summoned their cars to pick them up at 5 after 5.

This is the kind of idea that sounds good when you assume the current traffic environment stays the same and you're the only one doing it. It changes greatly when everyone is doing it. If autonomous vehicles are ever widely adopted, I imagine there will be legislation prohibiting deadheading, with possible limited exceptions for people with disabilities.

Maybe I am missing something, but don't Airports already solve this problem? I feel like you could trade the 500 car parking structure for something like an arrivals/departures lane that could quickly and easily see 500 people into their cars and on their way. Apparently 60,000 people go through Dulles every day, and their arrivals area is four lanes for about a quarter of a mile (from eye-balling it).

Maybe I am missing something, but don't Airports already solve this problem?

From my experience, every major airport is a clusterfuck of traffic. Numbered lanes with numbered stops help, but every lane is still a disgusting snarl-up. Adding more lanes would require more space for splitting and merging, plus you need to provide a way to reach the furthest lanes.

The impression I got from OP was that he was referring to the benefits of privately owned autonomous vehicles and not necessarily a subscription model. In that case, you can't just eliminate parking and replace it with a dropoff area. And while that may work for something like a Wal-Mart where there's a lot of space, I don't see how you'd implement it in an area like a downtown where the nearest parking structure could be a block or more away from the destination. A business district where I live has a four lane road running down the middle, and with disturbing frequency I'll be stuck in a traffic jam because an Uber driver making a pickup has effectively eliminated a travel lane. I can't imagine a situation where this becomes the usual mode of travel.

Thinking about the potential economics and regulation of self-driving car rental firms makes no sense without considering their closest analogy: the airline industry. If self-driving cars do become dominant, it'll start to look, in some ways, at lot like they're airlines flying a colossal number of tiny flights - for better and for worse in terms of stock prices and average customer experience.

Airplanes are buses.

This is an interesting analogy and lends itself to more elaboration.

In aviation, there have been autopilots for many years. But always the human pilot is in command, and uses the autopilot as a tool that has to be managed and overseen. Autonomous vehicles, at least in some companies' visions, have no way to control them manually. An airplane pilot enters waypoints into the navigation system to plan out a route; an autonomous car routes itself. The biggest difference is in who is responsible for the vehicle; is it the human operator or the vehicle's manufacturer?

I could see a kind of autonomous vehicle that works more like an airplane autopilot - you wouldn't necessarily need a steering wheel, but if you had control over the different high-level choices in route planning and execution (do I try to make this yellow light? Should I play chicken at this merge or play it safe?) then the human could be considered responsible in a way that a fully autonomous, sit-back-and-relax mode doesn't allow.

I am revolted by the idea of relying on a company akin to an airline for my day-to-day mobility. There are too many failure modes that leave one stuck. What if there's a natural disaster and all the phone networks are down? Or the car company has a de facto local monopoly, but then withdraws from this market or goes out of business? What if the company starts blacklisting customers for things that shouldn't be related to transportation, like their political affiliation or their credit score?

I haven't seen the video yet, but I'd dismiss 2 or 3 outright as doomerism since no one knows what the legislative implications of autonomous vehicles will be. You might see areas with few pedestrians optimized for self-driving cars, but I doubt anywhere with significant foot traffic would see it. I've written elsewhere about the subscription model and why back-of-the-napkin math shows that it won't work out, at least not at any significant discount from owning your own vehicle. Just to give a relevant example without getting into too many specifics: The general idea is that most of a personal auto's useful life is wasted because it's sitting at home or in a parking lot. Thus, it would be more efficient if someone else could use your car when you aren't. The upshot is that no one will own their own cars when autonomous vehicles will make it possible for the car to take itself where it is needed automatically.

The problem is that trips aren't randomly distributed throughout the day. There's an initial peak during morning rush-hour that gradually fades throughout the late morning before rising again in the afternoon and peaking around 5:00. It then begins to taper again into the evening, and there is very little traffic overnight. Compound this with the fact that land use isn't uniform, either. Commercial offices are mostly located in city centers or their own office parks. Industrial sites are located in industrial parks, riverfronts, or other areas where they are relatively segregated from other uses. Commercial shopping and entertainment districts are located along their own strips in the suburbs. Downtown Pittsburgh has something like 5400 residents but 54,000 daily workers and visitors. Most of the residents specifically chose to live Downtown because it was easy to get to work. So every weekday you have a huge mass of cars coming in, but the number of people looking for a ride out of Downtown at 9 am on a Tuesday is vanishingly small. None of these cars will be able to find fares very easily, and it will be late in the afternoon before there is enough demand to get them out of Downtown.

So there are two options. The first is that they park all day until demand picks up, in which case we haven't solved anything. The other is that they leave and try to find fares elsewhere. This makes things worse; now we've got rush hours that run in both directions, full of cars deadheading out of town in search of fares or cheaper parking. Environmental costs aside, this is a dystopian traffic nightmare. Enact rules on deadheading and now you also have to pay the cost of parking the car and keeping it on standby all day, defeating the purpose of the service.

Not Just Bikes's proposed solution is to completely ban anything related to cars from city centers: highways, roads, parking spaces, parking garages.

It's amazing how the same armchair urbanists who decry mid-century urban renewal inadvertently champion some of its precepts when it suits their anti-car tastes. When downtowns were losing business to shopping malls, it became trendy to pedestrianize streets or even entire business districts. The traffic disruptions meant that roads on the perimeter needed to be widened to accommodate the additional traffic, and buildings along these roads were torn down for parking lots. Architectural critic Anthony Paletta has described this as "strangulation by ring road"; once the business districts were disconnected from the surrounding neighborhoods, they began to wither away. Crossing a 4 lane one-way ring road was a hassle for pedestrians, and the centers became havens for derelicts. Some of the more notable revivals have happened only after cities restored the commercial strips to through traffic.

The other is that they leave and try to find fares elsewhere. This makes things worse; now we've got rush hours that run in both directions, full of cars deadheading out of town in search of fares or cheaper parking.

Instead of thinking like an urban planner, can we think like an entrepreneur? What business models are possible if you're expecting for there to be a bunch of autonomous cars showing up downtown early in the morning and wanting to head back to the suburbs, making such transit super cheap? Cheap breakfast delivery from your centrally-located kitchen? (Heck, sell the 'premium' autonomous ride into work that comes with breakfast in it for you, having picked it up before it deadheaded your way...) Cheap delivery of business goods to outlying locations? Amazon is currently delivering to your doorstep, but would suburban customers be okay with an autonomous vehicle with a robot arm or something that can at least dump your package at the end of your driveway? Could they design a dual-purpose vehicle that can bring a passenger into the city, turn around, deliver some number of packages in the suburb, then pick up another passenger?

(Note that this is not a sort of argument that we'd get to 100% autonomous vehicles, but just thinking that if there is value in substitution on some margins, this may be a new margin that could be opened up.)

I think you are right that there will not be fewer vehicles. We have some data to support that. The existence of Uber has not reduced private vehicle ownership (but has reduced public transit use).

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/has-the-existence-of-uber-redu-RmakZ2MPSxGxVrAtl9Z_fw

This tracks with me. The operating costs of one of these vehicles will be low (back of the envelope 3-4k a year). Most people who currently own cars would continue to own them rather than worry about capacity issues. On a practical level, in a city like Seattle, a driverless taxi would become a toilet pretty quickly. I'd much rather ride in style in my own car with all my stuff in it. Most Americans will easily afford it.

But driverless cars will displace public transportation. The cost to operate busses in a corrupt city like Seattle is well over $1 per passenger mile. Driverless cars will be cheaper, will deliver their occupants directly to their location, and will not expose riders to a risk of violence.

On a practical level, in a city like Seattle, a driverless taxi would become a toilet pretty quickly.

I wouldn't trust a fully-autonomous car in any location where there's a reasonable chance of any exterior disturbance in the vicinity of the car. Anything from wildlife to protesters to squeegee men - it's too easy to blockade the car (either intentionally or unintentionally) and harass the passengers.

South Africa once let you arm your car with flamethrowers. This might be a solution to squeegee men as well.

I agree with your conclusions from the standpoint of personal ownership as the situation currently is. People do like to have "their" car, even if it's "just in case". While there is some percentage of folks out there who have chosen to forgo personal ownership (or, say, downgraded their household from two to one car), it's not very significant yet. Significant price decreases across the board for autonomous cars won't necessarily change the perspective of the individual, as they'd see a similar price decrease on the side of personal ownership as well.

However, riffing a bit on vague thoughts, what if the demand signal came from businesses? I have a vague thought that, sometimes, services which once made financial sense only for particular, highly-remunerated employees may sort of trickle down the chain as the cost to the business decreases. (E.g., when work phones or flights are really expensive, businesses only pay for them for a small number of employees that are a) worth it to provide the perk and get the employee, and/or b) whose productivity gains would offset the cost.) So, I'm thinking, something like how the NFL has extremely highly-paid employees, some of whom are liable to get themselves into trouble with their cars or whatever. So the league offers a car service that will come pick them up and take them anywhere, at any time. Expensive? Absolutely. Worth it to them? Possibly. Lower down the chain, other companies buy company cars for high-level employees. Could be fleet-owned; could be subsidizing a personal purchase. It's a perk and form of compensation, as well as a bit of confidence that they'll be driving a newer, maintained vehicle, and aren't going to have to take unfortunate days off because of car issues. Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.

Uber is already targeting business. 'Offer commuting services to your employees,' they say. It's a perk to the employee, a way of compensating them; it's cheaper to the business than those other things. There could be perverse incentives, but presumably, the business can say things like, "We'll compensate up to this amount of commute, and if you choose to live further, you'll have to cost share," or something. But they'll get to work every day. It's easy to add in if they need to drive across the city occasionally for business, without jumping all the way to a company car. Maybe when you're negotiating that new lease for office space, you can also say that you only need twenty reserved parking spaces in the building's lot/garage, not a hundred. Uber is betting that they can get to a price point where maybe you used to offer company cars to your C-suite, but now you can offer Uber Business + Commutes to all your VPs as well.

If autonomous vehicles cut the cost of this service down even more, how far down the chain do the perks go? Probably not all the way, not 100%. But can it increase enough to make some money? Uber is betting that it can. Businesses don't care about limit arguments of, "Oh, what if tens of years down the line, the number of autonomous vehicles is approaching 100%; what are urban planners gonna do about deadheading?" They don't care what Autonomous Uber chooses to do with those cars once they've dropped off their employees. If it makes economic sense, they'll just do it. Unless and until, of course, the @Rov_Scam folks start to slap laws around to kill it. That's a problem for the urban planners and Uber to fight about. They just want to attract the best employees and make sure they get to where they need to work every day.

Now, if Uber is right and businesses actually start adopting this sort of thing more, it actually can change some amount of the personal calculation. It's not, "I have to do the math on a cost comparison, and I have to take the risk of surge pricing or delays in getting a driver, and I have to figure out whether the complicated set of tradeoffs allow me to put my personal faith and reputation in this service enough to consider having our household go to one fewer vehicle." Instead, it's, "Well, so my commute is covered. I don't have to think about that. I'm not going to save money by just choosing to not use it. Now, what do we want to have for personally-owned vehicles?"

Lol, Uber has been offering this for years.

Another example is that the financial industry already pays for employees to take late night taxis home.

It's common in law, too, and you can also order food if you're working late. I worked in an office on the North Side from 2015 to 2017, when we moved into new digs in the Strip District. The move roughly coincided with Uber Eats launching in Pittsburgh and us switching over to them for our "late night perks". To be clear, the late-night car service is aimed toward people who rely on transit to get to work and is only offered by companies that don't offer parking passes. the rationale was that after 8 pm, transit switched from operating every 15 minutes to operating every hour, and since we were on the North Side you'd have to either walk across the bridge to Downtown or take 2 buses unless you happened to be on your route already, and doubling the wait times made that impracticable. I lived in the exurbs at the time and almost always drove in anyway, so I never used it.

Anyway, prior to the move the firm used a black car service which was better than Uber but a bit intimidating for normal people. A guy a worked with who used it once was kind of freaked out when a guy showed up in a Lincoln and opened the door for him. The reason why we switched was that the process, for both that and ordering food after 7 pm, used to be cumbersome. You had to use the company credit card and get receipts, and then fill out an expense report and submit it to HR. Then, just to make things perverse, HR would come back to me with another form I had to sign to demonstrate that the expense had been approved by an attorney (even though I already signed the expense report). The HR lady was thrilled about the switch because we could just order everything through the company account which would put the appropriate restrictions on time, location, price, etc., and then not worry about the forms. Then like 6 months later they started charging an additional 10% on business accounts and she was mildly pissed. I still had to deal with a ton of other credit card approvals, petty cash forms, reimbursement forms, mileage logs, and other bullshit that I (and everyone else) waited to do until the last minute to the long-suffering HR lady's eternal consternation. Good times.

In any event, I haven't heard of anyone using Uber for Business other than for occasional transportation like when traveling out of town or something like that. I don't see it ever becoming an everyday perk for anyone, let alone common enough to have any significant impact on traffic. Perks are usually commensurate with the level of responsibility and the nature of the work involved. Lots of people work late, but most of them can't bill food to the company because the added value doesn't justify it. When the extra 3 hours you spend at work clearly nets the company an additional thousand dollars, 20 bucks worth of takeout isn't an issue. Company cars are usually reserved for people in sales or other jobs that require you to be on the road all day, and even then they have to pay taxes on them based on personal use. One firm I worked at gave the attorneys parking passes but admins had to take the bus. This is because they expected the attorneys to work late hours regularly enough that paying for a spot was cheaper than paying for a car service. Admins never worked late. I switched jobs specifically because I hated being stuck at work late enough to be able to watch night games at PNC from my office window.

I was able to speak this evening with someone I know who works in a suitable job, suitably high up, for a large multi-national. They also pushed back a bit, but I was able to prod. That company has fleet vehicles for a few categories of folks, many of which are plausibly job-needs-based. Some of those job-needs seemed like they might be replaceable by an ACaaS. Probably the biggest one that wouldn't have worked was a set of positions where they would be visiting multiple locations each day with overnight stays along the way. The problem here is actually kind of subtle, because it's not the first problem you'd think of with Uber. With Uber, your first problem would be that you may just be heading from town to town on your trip, so you might not get a human who wants to drive out there. With ACaaS, if the same company runs in the neighboring town, it can just join the fleet there. No, the problem was that then you'd have to pull your suitcase out of the trunk every time you got to a new location, and you're visiting 3-4 of them before you stop for the night!

Beyond job needs, this multi-national gives every single VP or higher a fleet vehicle. Why? Honestly, my interlocutor explained the reasoning, and there was nothing there that really made a distinction. Why not offer it to one level below VP, even a cheaper car (they offer different tiers of cars to different levels already)? No real reason. It would cost money. But it costs money to give them to VPs and up, too. At one point, the explanation was that the people high up enough already made so much money that they didn't want any more cash, so it was about finding other perks for them. (I lol'd a bit.) I guess you can save a little in taxes. I didn't dig in to details of how they compute it, but I was told that they do have a monthly charge on their paycheck to cover whatever taxable portion; it seemed like they didn't have much detailed paperwork and that it was a mostly fixed monthly charge; it also seemed pretty cheap. We consulted with ChatGPT about reasons to offer company cars, and it threw in that there could be cost benefits by making a deal with an auto company to buy higher volume for cheaper or to save on insurance.

Reason after reason just didn't draw a line. "It's a status symbol." Well, if your employees were all some multiplier more productive, couldn't you give one level below VPs their slightly lower status symbol, and give more expensive status symbols up the chain? Basically, it's expensive. If it was cheaper, I guess they could throw the perk around a bit more. Of course, like any perk, some employees might not even value it much; might prefer cash. My wife complains that her salary is lower because they offer health insurance, even though she doesn't use it, because she's on my insurance.

I was at some point told that those folks definitely didn't need company cars. In fact, when I poked around with whether something like Uber/ACaaS could make any sense if it could be done at the right price point, I was told that it would absolutely be just fine for those folks who are getting their car just because they're a VP-or-higher. Okay-ish for some job-needs. Just don't have a suitcase.

Their view, from the perspective of a multi-national, would be that it would be extremely localized. You mention some of the factors. Are you paying for parking passes? How much does that cost in your area? Would they be transiting in/out otherwise? If your city is going to hell in a handbasket, what's the value of making sure your valuable-enough employee doesn't get stabbed in the subway? We sort of settled on the idea that some set of factors could make it plausible in some places (again, the price point is a huge driver). But you're not going to have the same case in Peoria that you would in NYC or wherever.

They also told me that there are, indeed, folks in the business who are, for lack of a better word, agitating for the company to subsidize commuting costs for more employees. And it seems like this sort of Uber type thing is vaguely in scope of one of the ways they're proposing to do that below the level of company cars. I'm more of a 'just give me cash' kinda person, unless, like I said, there is some very acute parking situation or something that really aligns the business incentives.

For some reason I've never imagined before that municipalities could simply create their own uber clones and call that public transportation, but I really don't see why not. Yeah some people will rapidly lose their privileges to use it, and should, but surely that's a solved problem?

Its solved for Uber and Lyft exactly because they ban people. Public transit has the issue of banning people being basically impossible. BART-Lyft in San Francisco would quickly devolve into cars full of needles, feces, and vomit.

Well I mean surely someone out there is no longer allowed on the bus.

How?

Bus drivers recognize them and - oh yeah no way would violence be allowed.

But with municipal-uber, presumably access cards could be issued to people very cheaply and deactivated temporarily or permanently if abused. Sure someone could use someone else's card but then the person loaning it is putting themselves on the hook which seems fine to me. And all of this is before facial recognition.

Oh my sweet summer child.

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