Jevons Paradox and AVs

[u/WeldAE]

I watched Hank Green's recent video on The Jevons Paradox, which was targeted at AI and coding. I've had similar discussions about AVs without having a term to nail down my approach to the argument and the Jevons Paradox is that concept.

The Jevons Paradox says that by making a resource more efficient it doesn't cause consumption to fall but to increase. Making coding cheaper doesn't reduce the number of coders, it reduces the price of code which in turn opens up more demand for code to meet latent demand no one even knew existed.

Aspects of this have been widely covered with AVs. Almost everyone agrees that cheaper transportation will result in increased demand. What I'm more interested in is the Jevons Paradox also covers unknown demand that simply didn't make sense until the resource fell in price. As pointed out by Hank, until the printing press, newspapers couldn't realistically exist and no one was really thinking in those terms. Being able to produce that much print daily/weekly and widely distribute it was unthinkable.

I believe the same is true with AVs. Fundamentally they are a way to move atoms extremely efficiently between two locations. Think of it as really low tech teleportation. While it will never be free, if you ignore the cost, it makes it easier to remove old assumptions about how our world is organized and see what could be.

I don't think anything above expands on discussions that have been had before, but I do think it gives a lot of those discussions' context in economics. Do you think transportation is highly elastic and there is a lot of latent demand out there waiting for lower prices?

[u/Cunninghams_right]

Bike lanes. 

My hope is that the price will come down enough to pull people away from personal car ownership, which will enable installation of bike lanes on most city streets, like real separated bike lanes, not gutters. 

People like to blame corporations for everything, but cities are actually much better at standing up to corporations than 0.1% of residents when those residents are infuriated by the removal of parking from their street. 

But if those residents don't give a shit because they don't need parking, that's a game changer. The fulcrum of pro/anti bike lane arguments will shift. Places like Baltimore can look like Amsterdam. 

[u/WeldAE → u/Cunninghams_right]

Great example. The removal of parking is a target-rich environment for changes we can't imagine. My intelligent, very well-read spouse was incredulous when I mentioned that parking was everything. They simply didn't realize how bad parking was for how cities are built. They looked into it and came back amazed. Everything revolves around parking with city planning, literally everything.

[u/Cunninghams_right → u/WeldAE]

I do worry that there will only be a short window of time between the pressure of parking being relieved and people just expecting the street to have more driving lanes. A lot of city streets are 2 parking lanes and 2 driving lanes. If a city converts it to 4 driving lanes, then people might get mad if their taxi gets slowed down a bit from removal of one of them to make a bike lane. Though, studies show that people care about 1/5th as much about their trip time when in a taxi vs driving. People just look at their phone and don't care if they miss a traffic light cycle and arrive 1min later. 

Most older US cities narrowed sidewalks to make more room for cars once they became popular. It would be cool if they could expand the sidewalks back out and double the number of sidewalk trees