Please help me understand something about self-driving cars

[FrodosNewPet]

32. Two out of three ain't bad

As far as limiting environmental impact:

Taxis, ride sharing, autonomous mobility as a service all mean MORE miles driven. When you get in your car and drive 5 miles, then park, you are only using 5 miles of energy. When you hail a ride, the vehicle has to drive the 5 miles PLUS the distance to get to you. Perhaps that's 1 mile, or perhaps it is 10 miles.

As a cab driver, only about 35 to 40% of my miles were with a passenger in the car. The rest were getting to the pickup, getting to a staging area, or leaving and returning to the garage.

Another issue is that transportation demand is not steady around the clock. With transportation as a service, you generally have excess or inadequate capacity. In order to have enough capacity to serve peaks, you are going to end up with a lot of cars that have to park somewhere for most of the day. Conversely, if you limit your fleet in order to have a reasonably high utilization rate for 16 to 18 hours a day, you are going to have a lot of unavailability during peak demand.