Comment by WD-42
15 hours ago
Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.
So at 2am you would have thousands of cars driving around empty?
Or would you still need a giant spot of land to park these things outside of peak hour?
The giant spot of land could be in a much less convenient (= valuable) location if the car can take itself to and from there.
No. That's false. Riders will want a car to be at their location ASAP, or they will try to call another company.
So the incentive will be to put/drive cars very close to where people are.
That whole "cars will be stored at the periphery" is propaganda.
Roads designed for buses (and trucks) also cost many orders of magnitude more than ones build for cars only.
If you account for that, cost per passenger mile on fully loaded electric bus is more than uber chauffeur.