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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...
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
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.
NJB's video is terrible, but he makes at least a couple good points:
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;
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.
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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.
In a dense urban center, someone is always going to need a ride.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Deal with the consequences of. Sitting traffic as a passenger isn't exactly much of an improvement when you're trying to get somewhere.
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.
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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.
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Sorry to pick out one bit in an excellent post but, since this is the internet...
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.
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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).
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.
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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.
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