Comment on Tesla Robotaxis Are Crashing More Than 12 Times as Frequently as Human Drivers
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 days agoParadoxically, the large scale deployment of self driving cars will improve the walkability of neighborhoods by reducing the demand for parking.
One can also envision building on self driving tech to electronically couple closely spaced cars so that more passengers can fit in a given area, such that throughout of passenger miles per hour can increase several times over. Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.
jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 2 days ago
How will it reduce demand for parking? Do you envision the car will drop someone off and then drive away until it finds a parking spot that’s farther than the person would want to walk?
That sounds like a very hard problem , and people wouldn’t be happy waiting 5-10 minutes for their car to navigate back to them. Or it would just cruise around looking for parking, causing more traffic.
Once again reinventing buses and trains
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Plenty of high demand areas use human valet parkers for this issue. The driver drops off their car at the curbside destination, and then valets take the vehicle and park it in a designated area that saves the car driver some walking.
Then, the valet parking area in dense areas has tighter parking where cars are allowed to block in others. As a result, the same amount of paved parking spot can accommodate more cars. That’s why in a lot of dense cities, garages with attendants you leave keys with are cheaper than self-park garages.
Automated parking can therefore achieve higher utilization of the actual paved parking areas, a little bit away from the actual high pedestrian areas, in the same way that human valet parking already does today in dense walkable neighborhoods.
As with the comparison to valets, it’s basically a solved problem where people already do put up with this by calling ahead and making sure the car is ready for them at the time they anticipate needing it.
Yes! And trains are very efficient. Even when cargo is containerized, where a particular shipping container may go from truck to train to ship, each individual containerized unit will want to take advantage of the scale between major hubs while still having the flexibility to make it between a specific origin and destination between the spokes. The container essentially hitches a ride with a larger, more efficient high volume transport for part of its journey, and breaks off from the pack for the portions where shared routing no longer make sense.