[Graeme]

If Cars Really Could Drive Themselves, How Many Would We Need?

If self-driving cars become a reliable, safe, legal technology, here's a vision of what cities may someday look like.

There are no downtown parking lots or parking lanes.

There is no mall parking, no grocery-store parking, no airport parking.

There are no home garages where your car sits unused whenever you're home. In fact, you probably won't own a car at all.

Instead, you'll just request a ride (presumably on an app), and a car will appear at your doorstep. Once it drops you off, it'll turn to the next request. If there are none nearby, it may be rerouted to areas where demand is anticipated soon (say downtown before the evening rush), put to use delivering lunches or Amazon.com orders, or sent to a large open lot in the suburbs where it will wait to be beckoned.

Picture a fleet of these driverless cars, constantly swarming around a city, with no homes, no owners, no places of rest. It's bad news for taxi drivers and delivery men and women, undoubtedly, but it could also have dramatic, negative consequences for the car industry.

Why? Because we simply won't need very many cars, at least not compared with how many we have now.

For the amount of driving Americans do, we own an extraordinary number of vehicles. Today, the average private vehicle is in use less than 10 percent of the time. Most of the day, cars are just sitting parked somewhere.

But with a shared fleet of autonomous cars, we'd be able to drastically increase the hours per day each cars was in use. Instead of driving your car to work and leaving it at the lot all day until you used it again, you'd only need the car for the duration of the drive. Then it'd go on to other things.


So calculating just how many cars a city of the autonomous-driving future will need is a bit of a challenge, but, fortunately, a team of researchers at MIT, Stanford, and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology has taken a crack at it, giving us at least a preliminary sense of just how dramatic a shift this will be. Their conclusion: We'll only need about one-third the number of vehicles we have now.

In a new paper, the researchers take a look at Singapore, a city for which excellent data exists on how much people drive, to where, and how long it takes. Moreover, because Singapore is an island, the authors say, officials are limited in what they can do to alleviate congestion in the long run. As a result, the city is a promising candidate for a move to an autonomous, shared driving fleet. If it did, the authors estimate, the average Singaporean would save on the order of $15,000 annually, if you take into account not only the costs of car ownership, maintenance, and parking, but also the time people spend looking for parking, dealing with tickets, in line at the DMV, and other nuisances.

Based on their model, the authors, led by Kevin Spieser of MIT, calculated that at most times of the day, a relatively modest fleet of 200,000 vehicles would provide residents with cars within just a few minutes. The problems come at rush hour, when a fleet of 200,000 would send wait times skyrocketing above the hour mark. To keep wait times under 20 minutes during rush hour, they estimate Singapore would need a fleet of about 300,000. By comparison, in 2011 there were nearly 800,000 passenger vehicles in operation in the city.

theatlantic

[dolanbaker]

Driverless cars that drop off one passenger and then go to pick up another won't result in any fuel savings at all, all it would achieve is a reduction of "registered" vehicles.

If anything, it could result in additional congestion caused by all these cars driving around empty while going to their next client, just like taxis do now.

[Plantagenet]

There will be plenty of room for driverless cars because the driverless cars will be able to fly.



You'll just order up a flying car on your Aircar app to take you the B&B you booked through your airbnb app, and then it will fly back up into the sky to wait for the next call from someone needing a ride.

[Plantagenet]

If we're going to fantasize about a city full of driverless cars, why not fantasize about a city full of driverless flying cars.



Much more fun.

[Narz]

Or we could design cities that require less car use & decent public transportation, safe bicycle lanes...

[Plantagenet]

we could design cities that require less car use & decent public transportation, safe bicycle lanes...

That kind of design has already been done.

Amsterdam is the gold standard---Portland, Oregon isn't bad for a US city. Other cities should copy them.

But we don't yet have an example of a city built around driverless cars, much less driverless flying cars.

[americandream]

As many as accumulation dictates.

[dinopello]

If we're going to fantasize about a city full of driverless cars, why not fantasize about a city full of driverless flying cars.

Why does it have to be full of driverless cars to work ? If the driverless car could move at the speed of light (or faster), maybe we would only need one per city.



In all seriousness, the navigation and collision avoidance of driverless flying cars would be far simpler than land-based cars. For the most part, in the air you just need to worry about not hitting the other flying cars rather than all the stuff down on earth.

[Plantagenet]

If we're going to fantasize about a city full of driverless cars, why not fantasize about a city full of driverless flying cars.

Why does it have to be full of driverless cars to work ? If the driverless car could move at the speed of light (or faster), maybe we would only need one per city.



In all seriousness, the navigation and collision avoidance of driverless flying cars would be far simpler than land-based cars. For the most part, in the air you just need to worry about not hitting the other flying cars rather than all the stuff down on earth.

Those are really good points. I hadn't considered any of them.

But if we're really going to design an efficient transit system, why not have driverless flying fast-than-the-speed-of-light TIME TRAVELLING cars.

With a time-travelling car you could get call up the car on your cell phont ap, have it arrive, get in, and then after travelling to where you are going find out you've arrived there 5 minutes before you even left. Now that would be really really efficient.


the driverless flying fast-than-the-speed-of-light TIME TRAVELLING car of the future

[pasttense]

Driverless cars that drop off one passenger and then go to pick up another won't result in any fuel savings at all, all it would achieve is a reduction of "registered" vehicles.

But there are much more opportunities for carpooling with driverless cars. Why don't you carpool now?
1. Carpooling means trips take longer and time is money. But if instead of driving you are browsing the internet or watching a movie then you don't care.
2. From time to time you have to make a special trip after work. This would cause hassles now, but not with driverless cars.
...

[dolanbaker]

Driverless cars that drop off one passenger and then go to pick up another won't result in any fuel savings at all, all it would achieve is a reduction of "registered" vehicles.

But there are much more opportunities for carpooling with driverless cars. Why don't you carpool now?
1. Carpooling means trips take longer and time is money. But if instead of driving you are browsing the internet or watching a movie then you don't care.
2. From time to time you have to make a special trip after work. This would cause hassles now, but not with driverless cars.
...

Carpooling assumes a group of people going from the same place or close together and working in the same place, the perfect job for a minibus.

[dinopello]

Most people today in the US can't in their wildest dreams imagine how the human race could possibly survive without a car and driving.

Maybe someday people will not be able to imagine a time or situation where humans could possibly survive without driverless cars ? That would be real progress, right?

[SteveO]

Less cars needed, less cars built, fewer workers (more layoffs, all the way down the supply chain to mining the metals). Automated cars doing deliveries, no more UPS, FedEx and USPS drivers, once again, more layoffs. Automated cars probably won't wreck as often (they don't drink and drive or take their eyes off the road to text) so fewer body shops, repair shops etc. As some members of congress would say, it's a job killer.

Until we figure out that not everyone has to work and that some minimum standard of living has to be provided to prevent a violent revolution (reference France, 1790) the on going elimination of unskilled labor by technology has the potential for disaster.

[Pops]

Cars are about getting from A to B about as much as smartphones are about telephoning mom.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Driverless cars that drop off one passenger and then go to pick up another won't result in any fuel savings at all, all it would achieve is a reduction of "registered" vehicles.

But there are much more opportunities for carpooling with driverless cars. Why don't you carpool now?
.

This is an excellent point. Another point I haven't seen mentioned here is that driverless cars could help with public transportation. Today one must park (if one dares to put up with the risk/hassle) in a large parking lot near some major stop, if one lives in an outlying area in, say, Washington D.C., and wants to take the Metro to the city center. With a driverless car, one could be taken a mile or three to the subway stop. Perhaps another passenger or three could also be picked up along the way.

I think this could reduce the number of needed cars partly by breaking down the resistance to mass transit.

The main downside I see is these would need LOTS of maintenance if driven all the time, and wouldn't last as long as the normal fleet. (The maintenance could be done in cycles, at night, I would think). Thus they're far from free. It would cost a lot more than, say, taking the bus -- which is another potential upside for mass transit once people get used to not having their own car.

[Tanada]

Driverless cars that drop off one passenger and then go to pick up another won't result in any fuel savings at all, all it would achieve is a reduction of "registered" vehicles.

But there are much more opportunities for carpooling with driverless cars. Why don't you carpool now?
.

This is an excellent point. Another point I haven't seen mentioned here is that driverless cars could help with public transportation. Today one must park (if one dares to put up with the risk/hassle) in a large parking lot near some major stop, if one lives in an outlying area in, say, Washington D.C., and wants to take the Metro to the city center. With a driverless car, one could be taken a mile or three to the subway stop. Perhaps another passenger or three could also be picked up along the way.

I think this could reduce the number of needed cars partly by breaking down the resistance to mass transit.

The main downside I see is these would need LOTS of maintenance if driven all the time, and wouldn't last as long as the normal fleet. (The maintenance could be done in cycles, at night, I would think). Thus they're far from free. It would cost a lot more than, say, taking the bus -- which is another potential upside for mass transit once people get used to not having their own car.

Bus ridership in the Toledo transit system is so poor even with $4.00 gasoline that an accountant calculated they could hire taxi service for all the riders and still save money. Subways I have ridden on are great, buses by contrast are not.