Audi gets first California permit to test self-driving cars on public roads and highways.

[politicat]

24. Millions fewer cars, ultimately.

The reason I own a car is because it cannot drive itself. I use mine no more than an hour a day. The rest of the time, it's just taking up space in either my driveway or a parking lot. If I could have a share of a car, I would not own one. (That service is beginning to exist in my area, but it's not there yet. It's glorified Enterprise or Hertz, which isn't the point.)

Now imagine a car sharing service with autonomous cars and many people using the same car for the service. Abby goes to work at 7, the car picks up Brian at 7:30, drops him off, picks up Conan at 8, drops him off, picks up Dana at 8:30, then Edith at 9. Then it goes to get Frank for a doctor's appointment, then Gennie for grocery shopping, then Henry for lunch, then Irina from school for a piano lesson, then Jess for basketball then Kim for dinner out then Lee for an evening shopping trip then Mike from happy hour then Nat from a date. Another car picks up Frank at 11, Gennie at 2, Abby at 4, Brian at 5, and so on. The cars are never in a parking lot until middle of the night service. The people use them for transportation, then dismiss it and it goes on to next job.

It costs $9k a year to own a car. Our local bus passes are $960 a year. If you assume a car fare for an autonomous service is around $5 a use, a single user commuting is going to be about $3500 a year -- but couple an autonomous service with multi-modal transit (walking, biking, transit) and cost to user will be less than a car for fewer cars over all. Most households in the US are not efficiently sharing cars -- each adult has one, and that car spends most of its time sitting parked.

Parking lots are an enormous cost, not only to business (because parking lots must be based on highest demand rather than average use, that's why 95% of parking lots are 80% empty 90% of the time --they have to build for Black Friday, not Tuesday at 10:30), but environmentally and socially. A giant parking lot is a moat. It physically divides communities and makes walking difficult and they exist entirely for the convenience of the car, not the people. They contribute to the heat island effect in cities, and they're terrible for rain water and ground water since they're non-permeable and usually made of petroleum. The parking lot model of business development makes walking, biking and public transit more difficult and less attractive.

An autonomous system will also have the option of special request vehicles. I need a truck about three times a year. I need my hatchback (I drive a Soul) about once a month. The rest of the time, I need one seat. If I were one of my siblings, I might need two or three seats on a regular basis (sibs have kids; I don't), but an autonomous system can have highly efficient, one person units, or two or three, or six seaters. 85% of all car trips in the US are one person, going under 10 miles. We should build our traffic structure for most common, but instead, we've built it for trucks carrying tons of cargo and buses going 300 miles with 80 passengers. It's bad design, and suburbanization, the cul de sac and street-road hybrids have made the bad design necessary. (Note that this stuff didn't exist until 50 years ago. This is not how we built cities for 5000 years.) the bad design is the result of cars. Change the ways cars behave, and the bad design becomes a tragic footnote in civil engineering, much like Brutalist architecture or Victorian Gothic.