Why can't they instead spend 1B on buses, which would serve more people than support for driverless cars, and 3B on the homeless?

Seems worth investing in?

Certainly the people working on this are clowns that know nothing about safety countermeasures, and don't care about their whole industry going belly up if major accidents happened.

Continuous testing, code reviews, defense in depth, etc. are practiced to deal with that. The engineers that design cars (the "hardware") are as imperfect as anybody else. So are the engineers that design planes' autopilots. Nobody relies on an engineer being perfect, and there's no need to.

It was government funding via DARPA that led private companies to work on self-driving cars. Google simply hired to two winning DARPA Grand Challenge teams. The Internet is another example showing that the government is quite capable, and often necessary in driving technology forward.

You could make this argument for literally anything that isn't feeding, clothing or taking care of people, which means it is a silly argument.

Of course it can, there's no reason it couldn't. That doesn't make it a proper challenge. One would be "instead of $4B, $X should be invested on this, because of such and such". X == 0 without details is a big red flag.

Driverless busses would allow for:

* Every dollar spent on busses to go much farther

* Vastly improved public transit, which would allow people to live in cheaper areas and still have access to work.

I suggest the only reason taxi trips are so much more expensive than bus rides is the cost of medallions and driver wages.

Once driverless cars arrive, public buses will not make sense anymore.

http://publictransport.about.com/od/Transit_Vehicles/a/How-M...

How is that exactly? Buses have routes and schedules. How could you plan a schedule with cars if you don't know where everyone is going? You would have to have excess capacity, that's how. And those extra cars will be more expensive than the bus.

Please prove your point with examples.

If driverless car companies use something like uber's surge pricing, so that it is more expensive to travel 1/2hr before/after peak, people will respond, flattening out peak demand.

Intelligent routing software will assist, allowing people to car pool to reduce the required number of cars.

Finally, let's say if automated cars remove half the riders from buses, the costs of providing buses will need to be spread across half the number of riders, making the economics of running a bus system twice as expensive per passenger. At that point, it makes sense even more sense to replace the buses with cars.

The only question will be how long it takes for people to adapt due to existing habits having momentum.

In the UK there are a lot of buses that drive around with only a handful of passengers. It's a subsidised service that's important to lots of people, but ultimately very inefficient. I'd imagine at least 60% of bus movements (not passenger miles) could be replaced with self-driving cars.

It doesn't read at all like the US Govt is investing in developing self-driving car technology, of course plenty of private automakers are already doing that, it looks like US Govt is investing in self-driving car public infrastructure and guidelines.

"U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the president's 2017 budget proposal includes $4 billion over 10 years for pilot projects, including a program to test self-driving cars by investing in technologically connected roads. He provided few other details on how the money would be spent if it comes to fruition."

That sounds to me like they are try to pick technologies to invest in. If that's the use of funds, I think it's a waste. Let the market choose the best tech.

The private sector can't install a network of communication technology to wirelessly link roads and self-driving cars on public property (plus you probably need to coordinate with the FCC). From my reading, it seems like they're investing in things that only the government has control over and at the request of private sector companies like Google who want clear national guidelines formed and are probably pushing for a new "connected road" infrastructure.

But if you still can't see that reading of it, then let's just agree that there aren't enough details released yet so let's just wait for more.

Generally I agree with the sentiments you express here, but I just remembered the murderdeathwar on which many in the federal government would prefer to spend $4B. Compared to that, even if this is a total waste, it's not that bad.

This isn't going to take money from other wasteful or bad areas. It's just going to be more debt.

Some "can't be handled".

Just because Google or Honda's implementation (based on a camera) is geared toward a specific implementation, doesn't make it the best. Cruise Automation has the right idea with sensor arrays that make fog and rain a non-issue. There are lots of options.

I personally think this is going to be a huge problem with self-driving cars. They can't go anywhere if any of their sensors are faulty. And they need to have hundreds of them to work in all conditions. Ideally, you would want to have sensors in every wheel to tell you the pressure, sensors that tell you if there is ice on the road, sensors in literally every part of the suspension to monitor if you haven't suffered a broken coil or damaged bearing that could cause an accident - and those things break. Even such a simple thing as pressure monitors in modern cars are notorious for breaking down. Anyone who has driven a 5-10 year old car will know that there always is something broken. In cause of automatic cars pretty much every problem is a breaking problem that immobilizes the vehicle completely, and I think people will get tired of that pretty quickly.