On long trips on highways it just kills me that I have to stare at the same image for hours basically, and that a program couldn't do that more safely than me.

And if this happens, the airlines and all their fees and cramping and security and bad customer service can be brutally competed against for any trip under 800 miles, and probably longer.

Even a one hour 500 mile trip in a plane is really 3-4 hours, and you don't get a car at your destination, while driving there is about 5-6 hours. If I could surf that whole time or nap, then I'll drive.

If I can sleep overnight, then 8-10 hour drives become far preferable to flying.

If I have friends along the way to visit, or interesting places to vacation in, two or three day trips are more preferable than 1500-2000 mile flights, especially if you have a family and it is way way way cheaper.

Airlines have been reorienting themselves to shorter hops over the last couple decades. Self driving on highways will decimate that business, and only long haul/overseas will remain.

Although not strictly automated, they are externalized. That is you are not the one doing the driving, and therefor you are free to sleep, read, work, etc, while you wait to get to your destination.

The beauty about busses is that they exists. There is no unsolved technology problems with busses. And they can be (and most likely already are) implemented without any or minimal additional infrastructure in your area.

If busses are overcrowded your local government can simply buy more, so they scale really well. If they become congested, we also have a solution called trains. Trains also solves your problems with driving and as a bonus get you to your destination far quicker then driving.

Trains can be a superior alternative depending on what country you're in. In the U.S. we're far behind some other countries in high speed rail infrastructure, so over long distances trains are usually slower than driving.

Edit: As an example of political will for the established and proven solution of mass public transit system, over the unproven non-existent solution of autonomous highway driving lanes. Look at the steam (pun intended) the idea of establishing high speed rail between Portland OR, and Vancouver BC is getting from the public and politicians alike.

http://www.cascadiarail.org/

They have similar physics problems as cars.

1. They can't go very fast nor carry a lot of weight before they become uneconomical or unsafe.

2. They especially can't go very fast for very long if they are electrical.

3. They need a driver which makes them expensive to run often or with few passengers.

If you get to choose, what you want is something like:

A. Medium speed trains. Cheaper than high speed ones, but still twice as fast as cars with more comfort and less attention. But they need to have good infrastructure, so they can go that speed well and consistently.

B. Local buses with fixed routes.

C. Better golf carts for local transport.

Eventually you would automate all of them. Which would be relatively easy because the fast trains go on tracks, the buses go known routes and the cars, that are the most complex to automate, go slow. Slow also wouldn't affect for example automated deliveries, or repositioning, over longer distances.

Also even before automation as the cars would be "underbuilt", relative to today, they are cheap. So the don't get the sunk cost of a car. And since they don't go outside the local area, each municipality can choose their own infrastructure more freely.

Of course I don't see it happening as things are today, but this is in my opinion more inline with what should be discussed. Since things relative to physics isn't likely to change quickly.

With less cars in cities buses could be competitive with trains since they are street level and can go in different directions, but the would probably still have to be electric and automated for that to be true. (Of course you would still need subways and commuter trains anyway, but you wouldn't be as dependent on them). Trams could probably also be an option, but I am not entirely sure on the future of self-driving trams.

The drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles is about 3.5 hours. It's a 90 minute flight.

If you try to do it by Bus it takes 12 (often for about 1/2 the price of the plane ticket), and for some reason a train with NO STOPS took 16 hours. Which was discontinued just a couple years ago, because no one was using it.

Maybe someday we will get a high speed Mag Lev train for this commute, because mass transit has completely failed this commute.

Since this is a comment on a thread about the possibility of building the infrastructure required for highway lanes reserved for autonomous cars, i.e. a thread about how things "could work" I see no problems with giving my self the same leeway for the established technology as the parent does for any future technology.

Unfortunately, what the people paying for this want to achieve is the ability to not have to pay for a human driver, and if you need a human for the beginning and the end of the drive, you have to pay them for the whole time. So, while this would be an excellent application, I fear the business incentives are not aligned for it to happen first like it ought to.

If there were enough of them and someone like Elon Musk with lots of eyes on the road via teslas could identify when the vehicles need human drivers (wrecks / construction / weather) then maybe the trucks approaching the human-need area could get off at one of the staging areas for a human to take over. It would help with the "human from beginning to end" problem that would require level 5 automation.

You might not even need to team up for eyes on the ground if you have lightweight drones regularly flying the routes back and forth.

One problem might be enough people to take over at a moments notice. Another problem might be drivers who only get periodic experience handling the truck. But it seems like a semi-feasible solution to get a step closer to highway freight automation.

But as I read your probably-on-the-money prediction, I was thinking “here we go again, dumping money for the two-ton wheelchairs while alternative transportation goes begging again.” Where’s my fucking barrier-protected bike lane? Or any bike lane at all?

Frankly, if that’s how it goes, I wonder if it happens at all. “Separate lanes for wealthy tech workers” is how that’s going to go. You know why we can’t even get bike lanes? Because people bitch and moan because they don’t personally use it. Expand that to an empty lane of moving traffic while the plebs sit in traffic.

It’s bad policy to spend scarce resources (in this case road space) on something few people use. Just 0.6% of people bike to work at leas once a week. Bike lanes are a phenomenon completely out of proportion to how many people use them.[1]

Self driving cars will be that way at first, of course. But the big difference is that self driving technology has the possibility of becoming mainstream. Biking, by contrast, will never become mainstream. The average American commutes 16 miles one way. That’s an hour of biking each way (in weather that, in most of the country, is too hot or too cold most of the year).

[1] It doesn’t help that bike lane resources tend to be focused in areas where they disproportionately benefit educated white men: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2013/06/biggest-obsta...

You mean like self-driving cars? How about we spend "scarce resources" on things people actually do use right now, like bicycles, scooters, electric skateboards, whatever.

You're also arguing, "let's not spend anything on infrastructure for $ACTIVITY, then when no one does $ACTIVITY, we can say, 'yeah, but nobody does that'."

That prevents a smooth, gradual transition. Essentially you're proposing a massive public transport project that will progressively take over and replace existing transportation infrastructure.

I guess that's possible, but we could have done that without autonomous automobiles and it hasn't happened yet (well, not on a pervasive scale). Actually, if we could do that, I'm not sure we'd actually choose autonomous vehicles, as generally envisioned, as the mode of transportation.

Put another way: I think the whole lure of autonomous vehicles is the idea that they can adapt to existing infrastructure rather than the other way around. That's exactly what seems to make makes it possible for them to catch on in a big, general way, and eventually replace human driven cars.

I would wager we are at least a decade away from self-driving cars being a common part of daily life, in the sense that the average driver would see them on the road somewhat regularly. And probably 2 decades away from self-driving cars being an "everymans" vehicle and/or delivering on the concept of not having to own a vehicle and instead summoning one when needed, or putting your autonomous vehicle to work for you while you are not using it.

I have a friend in mapping at Uber ATG. Uber Eats is only available in areas she has mapped which makes me think that they aren't waiting for dedicated infrastructure and relying on their mapping database for now, at least for early development. Granted, Uber Eats isn't using AVs, but that makes me think the GIS crew is doing some heavy lifting there. Pure speculation on my part though.

Look at Uber, Lyft, Bird, AirBnB, and many other companies who just implement whatever they feel like and dare cities to challenge them. The path of corporate-profit-seeking SDC's seems far more likely than your vision of limitation and safety.

In fact, if we actually look what's happening on the ground, Waymo is advanced in Arizona, a regulation-light state. Tesla is pushing advancing features, hardware, and software across markets, though there are some exceptions made. Still, these companies are going to push for autonomy-everywhere faster than most would deem comfortable.

What do you mean?

I thought you were initially referring to Adaptive Traffic Signal Controllers [1]. They detect vehicle congestion in real time and adapt routing strategies to maximize throughflow. They also coordinate directly with other traffic lights instead of relying on manual timings. Which are often determined through lengthy and data intensive “signal studies”. These have shown to provide, for example, substantial time savings, fuel and emission savings, and there have been measurable positive effects on safety.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_traffic_control