Musskiah
DisGruntled
You are using a single scenario in the worst city to try to make the argument that RTs will not replace ICE cars meaningfully. I call hogwash...Safety would be helpful.
I was looking more at the second statement and no, I don't see it. Everyone needs to leave work at 5pm, for example. Those cars don't all just appear magically. The 1 car that makes the hour commute from downtown LA to Pasadena can't take the other person from downtown LA to Longbeach at 5pm. Maybe someone going for dinner in Pasadena but then it gets complicated. I've looked and looked at the RT/TaaS and I don't see the huge numbers people expect. Most cars are parked most of the day for a reason, we have traffic jams at certain times for a reason. TaaS actually does nothing for these. Most are travelers and people looking to enjoy themselves. Some replacement, surely. Not as much as some hype would suggest. In the transition you'll have RT vehicles wasting huge amounts of time doing what uber drivers (waste time waiting for rides) do but without the labor. This actually will hurt sustainability. What would make a difference is pooled rides but now that does not seem as likely.
There are 132M full time employees in the US, only about 35% of the population, many of whom do not go home at 5pm (all you have to do is think of all the professions that work long or odd hours and businesses open til 2, 4, 6pm etc...) - so for starters your scenario does not account for 65% of the population that needs transportation without full time employment.
Furthermore, LA is the exception, not the rule - it will require further ingenuity to solve, obviously. It is the toughest case for sustainability, to be sure. So will DC, NY, Chicago, etc. FACT: ONLY 42M Americans live in the 34 largest (over 500k people) cities. Perhaps another 20M or so commute into them for work or pleasure. MOST OF THESE 34 cities (such as Cleveland and Columbus and Cincinnati) do NOT experince meaningful rush hour traffic that compares in any way to LA. Your theory does not hold water here in the largest metropolitan areas of Ohio, for example. This is likely true of over half the states.
Aside from these 34 top tier cities, there are literally hundreds of small and middle cities in the US that do not experince the type of traffic, even in the worst hours, that you describe. In these small to mid-sized cities, where over a quarter of the population lives (the rest, aside from the 42M is large cities over 500k, are suburban and rural), RTs will begin to replace ICE cars immediately in the small and middle cities as well as large swaths of suburban and rural America, to be sure. The effect will not be ZERO as you seem to insinuate. We can argue about how huge this effect will be, but we can agree it will be a nonzero amount.
As a result, the world will become more sustainable. As privately owned cars become less common, the infrastructure such as parking lots and parking garages will be replaced. We would hope urban architects and engineers create something more harmonious is their place.
Have you considered that maybe you "don't see" the well-accepted theory that RTs WILL replace millions of ICE vehicles quickly, because you have to think about the whole picture instead of just an exceptional example of a mess of a city with some of the worst traffic on Earth?
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