Man uses his Tesla's “summon” capability to evade parking tickets

No, no - you monetize it. Sell time to an advertiser who commands your car to drive around target neighbourhoods with the windows wound down and the radio turned up loud, blasting out adverts at everyone. You know this is coming.

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Or rather you don’t actually own a car, but hire use of one just for the duration of the trip. Owning a car that spends 90%+ of its time sitting around ceases to make practical sense when it doesn’t need a driver to get around.

More likely to be ubiquitous billboard trucks - which will be much cheaper when you don’t have to pay for the use of a driver (and the vehicle doesn’t have to be engineered to carry human passengers - essentially just a billboard on wheels, making it a much simpler device).

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I suspect that self-driving cars will eventually radically alter the landscape since parking won’t need to be within easy walking distance of the thing being visited. Since people won’t be driving or getting into or out of their car in the parking lot, it also means that cars can park closer together, so less space is required. If cars are networked, so that they can move out of the way when needed, cars could be double parked much closer.

Stores and urban centers will become much more pedestrian friendly, since they will be able to be clustered around each other instead of surrounded by a sea of parking…

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“Sally” by Isaac Asimov.

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The summon feature is for parking lots, which are private property and not subject to the same regulations as traffic. A car moving on the street to park itself means he is now operating an unlicensed self-driving car.

I can’t imagine a single city where this is legal.

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The problem with massive car sharing is that it doesn’t scale for peak usage times… It’s true that our cars mostly sit around, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they have utility when we’re not using them…

Not that many people need a car at 2am, but almost everyone needs one at 5:30pm, so not everyone could necessarily hail a self-driving car when they need one. And that’s why self-driving cars will never create an traffic-free urban utopia by themselves. Unless we all stagger our schedules, we’ll need better public infrastructure with mass transit for that.

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Agree, but I wasn’t talking about driverless anything. Most parking restrictions are based on zones, not individual spots, so it’s typically illegal to just shift spots to beat the time limit, whether you’re physically operating the car or not…

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Can someone please enlighten me about the practical aspects of enforcement? How does the ticket writer know whether a car is over the limit?

Central pay metered parking (receipt with your plate number displayed on the dash) seems like a robust way forward for the city.

Short of that, are we left with noting what car is parked where? Chalk? License plate scanner?

May as well just buy an ice-cream van and quit your day job…

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If only there was some kind of large vehicle with multiple seats that people could share at peak times…

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Rich people privileges are sooooo awesome!

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Batman’s car had this feature back in '89.

car-stop

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Then you’re not talking about the article. Sorry to intrude into you off-topic conversation, my bad!

Oh, absolutely, 100%. People claiming that autonomous cars will somehow eliminate or even alleviate the need for public transportation to exist aren’t thinking things through. The reality will be the opposite. Mass transportation is more necessary in an autonomous vehicle future, even with staggered schedules (because although there will be fewer cars, they’re going to be spending more time on the road, so congestion will tend to be worse). But private ownership of cars still doesn’t make sense in that scenario, and it makes mass transportation more practical, as you can do short hops with hire cars to fill in gaps in travel. (Also, I think we’ll see new forms of mass transportation that have more flexible routes and schedules, whose dynamics are somewhere between current private vehicles and public buses.)
But even if you just replaced current commuter private car usage with autonomous hire cars, the vehicles would still get use after driving that commute, as there already is a certain amount of staggering of commutes, not to mention non-commuter uses (people running errands in the middle of the day, etc.).

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Self-driving parking enforcement. (Although a scanner net could do that job.)

My home city makes you move to another zone (basically at least a few blocks) or you’re still eligible for a ticket even if you move like OP did.

I suspect if this becomes common they’ll just tweak the rule.

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Only because there wasn’t a parking bay long enough for it in Gotham, right?

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A car provides two things:

  • Transportation
  • Semi-secure portable storage

Both of these could be solved with autonomous systems much more efficiently than current cars do, especially with some automated ridesharing being what most people do during rush-hour(aka minibuses).

Sure, it would be more limited than what you could pack in a car, but most people don’t commute with more than would fit in a standardized backpack or wheelie carry on.

It will just take forever in countries that aren’t willing to make seeping changes in fees/taxes/law to drive out self piloted cara and bad behaviour by automated cars.

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And that’s the good ending.

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the future of (word for butler)