Hear me out, I've spent years thinking about this :)
Yes, past underinvestment is bad. And yes, initially they are a band-aid, until yes they do become critical.
My excitement for self-driving tech isn't about the short term changes, but just how powerful a technology this is in the longer term. Ultimately this tech is not about cars, it's about the ability to automate the movement of mass. This is novel and meaningful.
An obvious medium-term implication of self-driving is that cities will ban human drivers, because that way cities can ditch a bunch of high-cost infrastructure required because of human fallibility. Up until that point, self-driving would be a band-aid. After that point, the dominoes start to fall.
1. Form factors change: cars become 1-4 person pods, stripped of the unnecessary bulk of excessive safety systems and unused capacity.
2. Ownership changes: municipalities will buy fleets of cheap mass-produced pods to replace extremely capex intensive public transport.
3. What is transported changes: now you have shipping drones dropping off standardized (reusable) packages into standardized intakes. Think The Box [1] but smaller.
4. Infrastructure changes: Roads narrow, parking becomes drop-off spots, larger cafes, actual parks. Cut and cover roads multiply, leaving more space above ground for people. Cities grow 20% without getting bigger, just by obviating the need for half their roads. The blight of various parking signs and warnings to drivers disappear. People can walk about freely or ride their bikes. It's quieter. The air quality improves.
5. Housing changes: Garages transform into rooms. People ditch bulky refrigerators in favor of ordering drone-delivered fresh produce in minutes. Drones deliver upstairs not just at street level. Pods become elevators. We've seen all this in science fiction... guess what the enabling technology is?
If you extend the implications of the automated movement of mass, the logical conclusion is the physical infrastructure of the city will transform to take advantage of every gain that creates. Cities dedicate 25-40%+ of their land mass to roads. In dense urban cores, 20% of their land mass is just parking spots. We can't route people-driven cars underground unless we really really mean it and build a highway. We waste a huge amount of space on transportation. We also shape all of our buildings around the constraints imposed by car-shaped objects and all their various externalities, including noise and air pollution.
My belief is that self-driving is easily the most transformative tech to hit cities since the car, and may exceed the impact that cars have had on the built world.
> 2. Ownership changes: municipalities will buy fleets of cheap mass-produced pods to replace extremely capex intensive public transport.
Producing more small things isn't usually more efficient that fewer equivalent large things. You can't just will some "pods" into existence that are magically cheaper (per person!) than trams, trains and busses. Also, once you have a system running capex and opex aren't that different - replacing a set number of vehicles per year is pretty much the same thing as operating expenses.
> 5. Housing changes: Garages transform into rooms. People ditch bulky refrigerators in favor of ordering drone-delivered fresh produce in minutes. Drones deliver upstairs not just at street level. Pods become elevators. We've seen all this in science fiction... guess what the enabling technology is?
My prediction is that no one will ever be fine with the amount of noise a "drone" (read helicopter) makes, especially as a replacement for the very noise-free and orders of magnitude more efficient elevators we have right now.
Agree to disagree about economies of scale, but FYI busses are ~$500k and seat ~40, meaning ~$12.5k/person. There are a dozen manufacturers of electric 2 seaters today that can build for a quarter of the cost per person, or half if you assume 1 person occupancy. Yes the area per person is larger (tho not by much), but you can make up for that with increased throughput by way of point-to-point operation without stops, faster speeds, and more.
Focusing on rollout, municipal light rail almost never gets deployed in US-style cities due to huge capex, not opex. Smaller vehicles allow incremental roll-out and can use preexisting road infrastructure. Ergo, that's the form of public transit you're most likely to see grow over the next decades.
Drone here doesn't imply flying, it's about scaling down wheeled vehicles and the coexistence of a wider variety of vehicle sizes on roads that is unlocked by the automated movement of mass. Delivery to higher up floors can be done through small in-building elevators. If you think that's unrealistic, consider that it was once extremely popular to use pneumatic tubes to send mail in buildings. Built infrastructure changes based on what is possible, and mass needs to move.
Yes, past underinvestment is bad. And yes, initially they are a band-aid, until yes they do become critical.
My excitement for self-driving tech isn't about the short term changes, but just how powerful a technology this is in the longer term. Ultimately this tech is not about cars, it's about the ability to automate the movement of mass. This is novel and meaningful.
An obvious medium-term implication of self-driving is that cities will ban human drivers, because that way cities can ditch a bunch of high-cost infrastructure required because of human fallibility. Up until that point, self-driving would be a band-aid. After that point, the dominoes start to fall.
1. Form factors change: cars become 1-4 person pods, stripped of the unnecessary bulk of excessive safety systems and unused capacity.
2. Ownership changes: municipalities will buy fleets of cheap mass-produced pods to replace extremely capex intensive public transport.
3. What is transported changes: now you have shipping drones dropping off standardized (reusable) packages into standardized intakes. Think The Box [1] but smaller.
4. Infrastructure changes: Roads narrow, parking becomes drop-off spots, larger cafes, actual parks. Cut and cover roads multiply, leaving more space above ground for people. Cities grow 20% without getting bigger, just by obviating the need for half their roads. The blight of various parking signs and warnings to drivers disappear. People can walk about freely or ride their bikes. It's quieter. The air quality improves.
5. Housing changes: Garages transform into rooms. People ditch bulky refrigerators in favor of ordering drone-delivered fresh produce in minutes. Drones deliver upstairs not just at street level. Pods become elevators. We've seen all this in science fiction... guess what the enabling technology is?
If you extend the implications of the automated movement of mass, the logical conclusion is the physical infrastructure of the city will transform to take advantage of every gain that creates. Cities dedicate 25-40%+ of their land mass to roads. In dense urban cores, 20% of their land mass is just parking spots. We can't route people-driven cars underground unless we really really mean it and build a highway. We waste a huge amount of space on transportation. We also shape all of our buildings around the constraints imposed by car-shaped objects and all their various externalities, including noise and air pollution.
My belief is that self-driving is easily the most transformative tech to hit cities since the car, and may exceed the impact that cars have had on the built world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)