The title is misleading. The main argument of Professor Frank Kelly from KCL is not against EV but against all cars. So burn calories by walking and cycling or use public transits, which is appropriate for highly populated megacities with severe congestion problems, let alone public health concerns.
The title is misleading. The main argument of Professor Frank Kelly from KCL is not against EV but against all cars.
Automated EV cars are a necessary step! Once automated EV cars become the norm, there will be even more value placed on Public Spaces of Value. Right now, the dirt and fumes from current automotive technology -- along with the requirement for vast paved areas for parking -- make it harder to achieve the traditional urban Public Spaces of Value so common in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries. (That said, not having horse excrement everywhere was an environmental boon of cars.)
Once automated EV cars become the norm, society will think about urban transport differently, and we will change the urban environment in just as drastic a fashion as we did to make way for internet combustion engine cars.
Right now, public spaces most often have to be of a large granularity. We can return to a time when urban Public Spaces of Value were ad-hoc and adjacent to residences and businesses.
My point is, that the model of car ownership will change, along with a public awareness of the benefits of a different model. When everyone owned their cars, they had sunk costs that would align them against putting more public resources toward other forms of transit. When cars transformed urban landscapes into paved-over internal-combustion pollution zones, the traditional charms of Public Spaces of Value were obscured or in some cases wiped out. But when autonomous EV cars start to undo some of that mess, people will start to think, "You know, we still have these traffic jams, maybe there's a better way of doing things?"
EDIT: >sigh< My whole point is that automated EVs will free public thinking, enabling yet further changes to the public's thinking about how urban transport works. Please provide a quote where I say that automated cars are more efficient than other forms of public transport. (I only say that they will be more efficient than current cars.) Also, please provide a quote that shows I consider automated EVs to be an endpoint in the evolution of transportation.
I'm far too often unpleasantly surprised at the level of reading comprehension here on HN.
You are still missing the point. Streets in megacities just don't have enough space for cars, automated or not. It's about efficient transportation not automation. This is the same reason Elon Musk is so frustrated in LA traffic (just like London, NYC, Paris etc.) that he is doing The Boring Company to dug underground tunnels solve the transportation.
Well, you could argue that automation could improve driving efficiency. Will full automation, you could potentially have more cars use the same amount of road space, since they have more immediate reaction times. Maybe not enough, but it's something. You may also eliminate a fair number of trips by one-car families who have to drive a spouse to work, then go home, then go back out again to pick them up and home again. Little things like that might add up. But yeah, overall, public transport would be preferable. Of course, automating buses would probably make for cheaper operating costs, and potentially make them more available.
Also, the point about parking seemed to be overlooked. Being able to eliminate almost all the parking spaces in a built-up area would be a pretty huge boon. Vehicles could simply drive out to less cramped areas during low volume times when they aren't needed, or to recharge.
No matter how efficient the automated algorithm moves the cars around, the vehicles are still take spaces on the road, no? Given that streets spaces are more or less fixed (expanding road lanes are usually very costly long term projects in megacities), there is always a cap for how many cars can be run on the road. Hence walking/cycling/public transits make much more sense than cars.
There is a cap, but the question is whether that cap is high enough to meet demand. If demand stays the same, and you increase the number of cars that can fit on a given road at once by decreasing the space between them, you've potentially reduced congestion.
Walkers, cyclists, and public transits also take up space, and there is a theoretical cap to how many a city can support. It's just that the cap is well above any reasonable expectation of demand, because those are all very efficient in terms of space. So, it's not really a difference in class, just a difference in degree. Cars don't necessarily have to be as space efficient as walking, just space efficient enough.
My whole point is that automated EVs will free public thinking, enabling yet further changes to the public's thinking about how urban transport works. Please provide a quote where I say that automated cars are more efficient than other forms of public transport. (I only say that they will be more efficient than current cars, and you'll have to go to an entirely different day to find that one.) Also, please provide a quote that shows I consider automated EVs to be the endpoint in the evolution of transportation.
Automation is a piece of efficient transportation.
However, I think driverless cars are not a solution by themselves. They bring efficiency gains in the form of reducing jams because they can drive closer, communicate with city infrastructure, etc. But these gains probably wouldn't offset the number of people who will all of the sudden gain access to a more convient (and probably cheaper, without regulation) method of transit, who will thus increase total car usage.
It's going to be a challenge to reach transport homeostasis among driverless cars, driverless buses, subways, etc. Taxes or surge prices will probably need to be added to distribute people in an optimal way across multiple forms of transit so not to overload city infrastructure. I'm thinking prices are going to be driven more by physical limitations than individual operational costs (eg subway electricity usage). But this will need to be government regulated because private companies are not currently incentivized to minimze traffic (visible currently in ridesharing companies).
Most traffic jams are more a factor of human nature then anything else. Ever been in a slowdown due to drivers checking out a fender bender going in the other direction on a divided highway? Combine the lack of unneeded slow downs with closer following distances with fewer crashes and road capacity will go way up.
> Most traffic jams are more a factor of human nature then anything else. Ever been in a slowdown due to drivers checking out a fender bender going in the other direction on a divided highway? Combine the lack of unneeded slow downs with closer following distances with fewer crashes and road capacity will go way up.
Even with autonomous cars, roadways still have a peak capacity. Yes, the peak capacity will probably go up if every driver is driving "perfectly", but there will still be plenty of bottlenecks, whether those are slower moving trucks, crosswalks, traffic signals, etc. I'd guess that we might even see more traffic than we currently have because if you don't have to drive yourself, people are incentivized to take their car; even if it's slower than mass transit, sitting in your own car is more pleasant for most people than a train or bus.
Morning and evening rush hours are still going to be a thing.
If autonomous vehicles reduce the per-vehicle impact of rush hours, I expect that we'll just start seeing more cars participating in rush hours via induced demand. (People will not avoid them as much; people will switch from public transport to private autonomous transport; people will be more willing to live farther from work for cheaper housing/more land/whatever.)
It seems like there are plenty of ways self-driving cars and public transport could work together, by picking up and dropping people off without the need for parking, making car sharing easier, and by letting some less-used routes shut down off-peak.
