Gregor Vukasinovič
The Trouble of Having to P
Public transit and autonomous cars have one shortcoming in common: An external party can tell you where you can go and where you can't.
In case of buses and trains, by means of cutting areas off of the network. In a self-driving car that can be accomplished with relative ease by marking certain areas as no-go. The vehicle just won't take you there. It's already being done in the electric scooters you can rent and unlock via an app. And those aren't even self-driving. Yet if you try to drive them into an area the city doesn't want them to go, it'll just stop. Not every city has such areas, but some do. Who says that couldn't be implemented in a car, computerized and always online as they are now? Probably the same kind of people who say you'll never have to pay a monthly fee for your heated seats in a car that cost tens of thousands of Euros.
As to why anyone would want to restrict where you can drive your car: Think about that like a despot. An operation like Auschwitz or such would be much harder to pull off nowadays, when everyone and their grandma has a smartphone with a camera, a drone, and a dashcam in their car. Especially here in densely populated Europe where there's not much of empty space where you can hide your Area 51s and what not. So how do you keep them away from places you don't want to show up on Facebook? Well, leave it to cyber, I guess. Leave it to Elon. You know Elon? Elon Mush? That guy who once shot a cigar into space only to prove you can still smoke it when it comes back down again? Well, not if it lands in the Puget Sound, but that's a different story. It was a miscalculation, alright? Also, they still smoked it in the end, it just tasted a bit like orca blubber.
Anyway, they'll probably market the feature as one that improves safety or something like that, like never having to pay a fine again for driving the wrong way in a one-way road or something, or as a security zone around critical infrastructure.
With normal cars nowadays, there are of course also areas where you're not allowed to go, and usually for good reasons. The difference is, you still can if you want to.
Anyway, I was going to talk about something else entirely. It doesn't quite meet the definition of a rebound effect, but it's still somewhere there in that corner: Going everywhere by train, you don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and a few other things. With a car, that is an issue of course. Yet at the same time, all the places I get to that I'd never have discovered otherwise - it became very clear very soon I have no intention to ever look back again.
Needing a parking spot is more of a privilege than something to get annoyed about.
The Trouble of Having to P
Public transit and autonomous cars have one shortcoming in common: An external party can tell you where you can go and where you can't.
In case of buses and trains, by means of cutting areas off of the network. In a self-driving car that can be accomplished with relative ease by marking certain areas as no-go. The vehicle just won't take you there. It's already being done in the electric scooters you can rent and unlock via an app. And those aren't even self-driving. Yet if you try to drive them into an area the city doesn't want them to go, it'll just stop. Not every city has such areas, but some do. Who says that couldn't be implemented in a car, computerized and always online as they are now? Probably the same kind of people who say you'll never have to pay a monthly fee for your heated seats in a car that cost tens of thousands of Euros.
As to why anyone would want to restrict where you can drive your car: Think about that like a despot. An operation like Auschwitz or such would be much harder to pull off nowadays, when everyone and their grandma has a smartphone with a camera, a drone, and a dashcam in their car. Especially here in densely populated Europe where there's not much of empty space where you can hide your Area 51s and what not. So how do you keep them away from places you don't want to show up on Facebook? Well, leave it to cyber, I guess. Leave it to Elon. You know Elon? Elon Mush? That guy who once shot a cigar into space only to prove you can still smoke it when it comes back down again? Well, not if it lands in the Puget Sound, but that's a different story. It was a miscalculation, alright? Also, they still smoked it in the end, it just tasted a bit like orca blubber.
Anyway, they'll probably market the feature as one that improves safety or something like that, like never having to pay a fine again for driving the wrong way in a one-way road or something, or as a security zone around critical infrastructure.
With normal cars nowadays, there are of course also areas where you're not allowed to go, and usually for good reasons. The difference is, you still can if you want to.
Anyway, I was going to talk about something else entirely. It doesn't quite meet the definition of a rebound effect, but it's still somewhere there in that corner: Going everywhere by train, you don't have to worry about finding a parking spot, and a few other things. With a car, that is an issue of course. Yet at the same time, all the places I get to that I'd never have discovered otherwise - it became very clear very soon I have no intention to ever look back again.
Needing a parking spot is more of a privilege than something to get annoyed about.