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Dan_Moore comments on Open thread, 24-30 March 2014 - Less Wrong
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I am wondering about the effect of the advent of self-driving cars on urban sprawl. Will it increase or decrease sprawl?
Urban sprawl is said to be an unintended consequence of the development of the US interstate highway system.
Passive voice / finding causes is hard / compare LA and SF.
This is not really a haiku.
Here's an economics analysis: self-driving cars reduce the effective cost of a commute, by allowing the passenger to focus on other things than driving during the commute (reading, watching TV, playing games, etc). Since a significant limit to sprawl is the cost, broadly construed, of long commutes, self-driving cars will increase sprawl.
Some factors pointing towards an increase: decreased emotional, health, and financial cost of commutes.
Some factors pointing towards a decrease: decreased cost and increased flexibility and convenience of car-sharing services, which work better in higher density locations.
I think the primary driver of urban sprawl is schooling (and thus home prices), not commuting. The growing acceptance of online schooling will likely decrease urban sprawl significantly.
Based on the idea that you get what you incentivize, and irrespective of other factors, I'd expect a marginal to mild increase. Self-driving cars can make commutes a bit more pleasant and substantially less dangerous, but they can't reduce commute times (until they reach saturation or close to it), and time's the main limitation.
Actually, I think that there is great potential for self-driving cars to reduce congestion and thus commute time.
Some of the effects will depend on details of the implementation. For example, if self-driving cars are constrained to obey highway speed limits, the commute time may increase in some cases, at least initially. Upon achieving saturation of self-driving cars, I would expect shorter commute times on non-highways. Also, upon saturation, it may be seen as desirable to raise the highway speed limit.
Keep in mind that non-self-driving cars will always be cheaper and will always have a market no matter how good autonomous ones get since autonomous vehicles have more parts and maintenance needs. You will never have an area with only autonomous vehicles, absent massive government intervention.
I place the likelyhood of massive government intervention or the equivalent (insurance becoming flat out unavailable for manual drivers) at somewhere north of 90 %. Driver error has a really high cost in quality adjusted life years, every year. If eliminating that cost becomes an option, it will get used.