I'm usually not a person who's sympathetic to complaints about advances in technology eliminating jobs. Not for a real overall long term gain to society. But autonomous cars putting swaths of people out of work while at the same time taking us in the wrong direction on traffic, emissions, etc. doesn't feel great. Those drivers losing work slowly over time as cities evolve truly better and more sustainable transportation options feels more right.
Aside from the opportunity cost of not furthering public transportation, autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking. We already have Uber creating waste by idling/driving around between passengers.
On the contrary: making taxis cheaper (which self-driving can do, by eliminating the biggest cost - the driver) makes it much easier to live without owning a car.
If there was no Uber and such, I'd probably have to own a car for the exceptions not covered by public transport. And after paying for the fixed costs anyway, the marginal cost per trip is low, making me more likely to use it over PT.
autonomous cars will drive around aimlessly anytime the cost of fuel is less than the cost of parking
Per the above, cheaper taxis → fewer owned cars → more free parking spaces.
Say public transport covers 95% of my needs. If I have cheap taxis, I'll use public transport most of the time, and cars only 5%.
If I have to buy a car because I can't afford those taxi rides, I might use it for 30% or 40% or more of the trips, since it just costs me a bit of gas (or electricity) - the fixed costs are sunk.
- The monthly payment on the car (if applicable)
- Liability / collision insurance
- Gas
- Tolls
- Parking
- Repairs
- Washes
But yes, I'd agree with you that many people don't seem to account for those hidden costs when justifying driving over taking public transit in a city that adequately supports it. Hopefully one day soon that will change.
Big-city issues like parking and congestion charging can tip the scales quite a bit, with much better public transport than the rest of the country to compensate.
We could put effort into making them better but it's not as sexy.
Very high densities are both the problem and the solution. They're the problem because under very high density private car ownership is infeasible, and the solution because public transport becomes fast and affordable. If you let it.
2. Not even building, just repurposing. "This road/lane/whatever now SDV only."
3. Trains only run on rails. Trucks that could be run as SDVs on dedicated infrastructure and as human-driven on shared infrastructure tackle the last-mile problem far more efficiently.
4. Trains are built on the "smart infrastructure" paradigm (go straight at the speed which the signals tell you, until the signals tell you to stop); trucks on the opposite "smart vehicles" paradigm (road exists, everything else is your responsibility). This makes a truck rollout far more scalable (as in "just add this road to whitelist").
Trains work for some freight delivery patterns, but not nearly all. Stuff that can go by train for the most part already does.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...
They're already testing with customers! Customers who love the service! They're planning for a roll-out later this year!
https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/
They can handle rain and snow!
https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/07/mit-maplite-self-driving...
Waymo has solved problem after problem you think they haven't solved yet, for some reason. They've intentionally gone after unpredictable situations and dealt with them.
Look at any video where they explain how it works, and you'll notice how many situations they can manage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg
And even if Waymo only works on well-mapped cities? That's still far from "can only work if they repurpose existing transportation infrastructure to only belong to self-driving cars" which is the comment I was replying to.
If we take "self driving cars" to mean "cars handling every siytuation", I completely agree that reaching 100% without either restricting the area or modifying the driving environment won't be possible within several decades. But my guess is we never get there because no one will make that investment for such little gain. Completely autonomous driving (handling the things that happen only once in a drivers lifetime) will require so much of human intelligence that if you have that kind of AI there are probably better things to do with it than drive cars around.
And to build a self driving system that can give you a reasonable time to actually assess the situation and respond to it? That's the same system that's 99.9999% reliable.
This is the crux of why self driving cars will simply not work in the foreseeable future unless sequestered to their own tightly controlled road networks.
I don't think the problem will be any situation with short reaction times at all. Nothing at freeway speeds, or situations like the Uber accident. That I think is where autonomous cars will shine, because sensors never get tired and reaction times are great.
The weird things that will happen which I count to the "not going to solve any time soon" category will be when the car comes to a completely snowed over roadworks, in the middle of the night, with the diversion signs completely hidden in snow. Construction workers barely visible in the snowstorm. Are those guys roadworkers or pedestrians? Are they working? Can I pass here? Will I get oncoming traffic because they narrowed it to one lane?
When things this weird happens at highway speeds or anywhere else where reaction is important - humans probably fail too. And at that point it's not really a question of technology but one of trust. Can we allow autonomous car to kill tons of people every year, with the sole excuse that humans would have killed all those people too, and then some? I'm not convinced of that either - I'm only arguing that from a technological standpoint, it should be possible to reach the 99% cars within a rather short timeframe. Those cars may be left on the scrapheap of history because of legal or ethical reasons, however.
In reality it's mostly just the AI expected one thing, and observed another - so something's not working right and it seeks a disengagement. California requires companies to quantify disengagements and most go a step further and specify the reason for the disengagement. I think the reason for this is precisely because of your intuition -- thinking that disengagement means imminent danger. Even for companies with relatively large numbers of disengagements, there were generally 0 that involved any danger whatsoever.
These would be (remote) car pilots, probably specialized in specific areas.
The auto-land disconnect scenario isn't applicable to cars. It happens because jet liners are _flying_ and suddenly ceasing to fly in a jet liner is both very bad and perhaps unavoidable in the absence of enough information to operate the plane within parameters.
In contrast when a car becomes uncertain about what to do it's not flying so _stopping_ is almost always a good choice. It's not ideal, it may block traffic and be a nuisance, it might even cause a small accident of some sort - but it's very likely to end with everybody walking away, not with a burning wreck and dozens of dead.
https://blog.piekniewski.info/2017/05/11/a-car-safety-myths-...
> Now it is important to note that the definition of a "disengagement event" may vary between companies. Most companies report every case in which a human grabs the wheel for any reason. Waymo (*) only reports the events, in which if not for the human intervention the car would actually cause a dangerous situation [read more here]. The way they do it, is for every physical disengagement they gather all the sensor data and next simulate multiple scenarios. If these scenarios lead to a dangerous situation, such event is being reported. According to Waymo in 2016 nine events would have lead to the car hitting an obstacle or another road user, approximately 1/10 of all disengagements they've reported (124). Hence there is such a gap between Waymo and the rest of the pack.
I also think it's hard to generalize from Waymo employees being attentive and general road users achieving the same thing.
The only thing that could make it happen is a giant like Google/Alphabet investing enough cash to lobby governments to repurpose existing transportation infra to only belong to self-driving cars. But that's also the doorway to a dystopian future where megacorps run entire countries.