Behold! https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg
Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of passengers.
The problem with trains is that they are very, very inconvenient for most journeys. Sunday evening? forget it. After 11pm? Nope. Journey that runs perpendicular to the local line to London? Lol, enjoy a 5 hour journey to go 100 miles. Want to take cargo like a new washing machine? Lol. Want to go somewhere that's not near a station by bus? Enjoy Journey times that are 4, 5 or 10 times slower than a car.
Trains are good for busy commuter lines and nothing else.
2) a train doesn’t need to replace 100% of personal car trips to be useful. I’m sure you’re not transporting dishwashers or taking trips after 11 pm every day. Covering 90% of use cases is sufficient, and the other 10% can be handled by either renting a car or taking an Uber.
3) we can and should make busses faster than cars during times of congestion by giving them their own lanes.
- where you want,
- when you want,
- carrying what you want,
- as fast
- and as safely as possible,
- at the lowest cost possible.
Trains are weak on multiple axes here: they do not go where you want to go and they do not go when you want to go, and you cannot carry large amounts on them. They are also quite slow.
The only reason that anyone uses trains is because in dense urban areas like London, cars are even slower, and for intercity trips it is both slow and hard to park when you get to the destination city. There are perhaps some exceptions to this but they don't really exist in the West. Really fast intercity trains are a thing in China and Japan, but the UK has no trains that take you from A to B at an average speed greater than a fast car once you take waiting and stopping time into account. As far as I am aware the same applies to the US as well.
Trains do not cover 90% of use cases, they cover maybe 10%. In my opinion, trains are a technology that should be completely scrapped in favor of driverless minibus and driverless car networks. Modern electric & driverless vehicles with internet connectivity and global transport optimization like Uber would beat trains on every single axis.
Consider Singapore, which is tiny, has a kick ass public transport system (trains and busses) and where it costs 90-100k SGD to own a beater Corolla: people still own cars.
That said, Singapore public transportation (at least SMRT trains [2]) is freaking strict about food and drinks. I could not even have a sip of water without triggering a warning message. So anyone who can't control their thirst or hunger (like, you know, basically any kid) isn't really welcome there.
[1] https://www.budgetdirect.com.sg/car-insurance/research/car-o...
[2] https://www.smrttrains.com.sg/Journey-with-Us/Travel-Informa...
If you are going from one city centre to another, during the day, the train is the best choice.
If you are moving within a bike-friendly city, bike is best (or Uber, but it is banned here). If you are somewhere in an urban sprawl, it's car or Uber.
I definitely find trains useful, but I think that they are consistently overrated by people for emotional and irrational reasons. I personally use trains for maybe 1% of my journeys and trams for 0% despite them being extremely prominent in my city.
There are no commuter trains Tasmania.
Urban commuter trains will have little effect on that ~45% of people who won't live near them even if they are built.
On the flip side, though, I guess, that doesn't mean we shouldn't build more train lines.
1. https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-...
The last train I could take on a Friday night was 10pm, but given it was a 3 hour journey that didn't seem unreasonable. Each year there was usually one incident that caused delays, but other than they worked well. If I took a fast train the journey time was around the same as driving - quicker in fact given on the journey I would stop for a break - and ticket prices were about the same as driving (for 1 person).
On the other hand I was working in London in 2018, and at weekends often flying from LTN. In the end I added an hour buffer (to a 45 minute journey) because the reliability of Thameslink was so bad.
But to stab at that anyway, it wouldn't be silly if he did. People driving impaired for lack of other good and affordable options is an emergent reality, no matter how morally hazardous it is.
Of course sometimes you dont want to travel late or at weekends
Highway-autonomous vehicles would give you the benefits of rail service plus arbitrary departure times, more direct routes, on-demand route changes, and you're traveling in a vehicle that you can use for first and last mile and intra-city travel.
But otherwise agreed a ton of this stuff could be solved with modern trains.
But appeasing all of the special interest groups in between has made infrastructure development impossibly expensive or takes a decade. So we keep driving cars even long distances between cities.
The former government owned national railway basically owns every piece of important track and doesn’t give a damn about customers. The prices are constantly rising while the service declines. Can’t count how much time I’ve wasted on several train stations, waiting for up to two hours for late trains, hell, even having to get a hotel multiple times.
I'd say that, in the majority of cases, it's either no more difficult or outright easier than getting to an airport, as airports tend to be located on the outskirts of cities (requiring connecting train/bus service or private cars), while most rail hubs tend to be in city centers.
(compact towns & bicycles)
On top of that, I personally (and know many agree) HATE the stress of keeping track of times, scheduling around infrequent departures, logistics to/from stations, etc.
> Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of passengers.
Yeahno. "please wait 15-30 minutes as we shuffle cars around the rail yard" is not exactly "at will"
I gladly pick rail over car for good lines, because it's stress free. Get to the station in time (with public transportation it's quite deterministic, subways and trams don't get into traffic jams, buses sometimes do).
Cars of course win when it comes to flexibility (late night getting to a small town address).
Of course, I live in a city, where parking is a major pain. But the other things still hold. It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle.
This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. The more I use them the more I wish for a world where every car was shareable: you need to go somewhere? you simply get into the nearest parked car and drive it to where you want to go. And, unlike autonomy, there are no technical barriers to this, only the will to do it and the economic model to sustain it. Sadly these services seem to be in full retreat now but I will miss them and still hope they'll rise again soon.
This is not the conclusion I would draw from car2go failing out of North America. They still had the problem that you are required to find a legal parking spot and there's no guarantee that there will be a car available anywhere near you. Taxis and private vehicles solve the latter and former respectively but they all suffer from the inefficiencies inherent to the system design.
[1] https://mifold.com/products/mifold-the-grab-and-go-booster
I’m imagining how gross a taxi would be that doesn’t have a driver to provide passengers a low level of behaviour moderation.
If people have to pay the cleaning bill they will be careful not to make a mess.
So riders blame the mess on the previous passenger. Then the taxi company installs cameras. It’s all gross (and yes, I’m aware many taxis have cameras already).
Self driving taxi will be a new possible way to get from A to B, and people will chose their own trade offs.
Probably human driven taxis will become the luxury eventually.
And often that is the hardest thing to get rid of.
For "free floating car sharing" (DriveNow/ShareNow, Yandex.Drive, ...) this seems to work quite well.
I've talked to a number of uber drivers. The cameras recording the passengers are a much greater inhibitor of bad behavior than the driver.
Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. Now the liability for that behaviour is with the driver. In an autonomous car the liability would be Uber which is why they won't do it.
An Uber that needs to look for parking in order to pick you up is never going to work in most busy cities. So I suspect you will see people opt for the driver based taxi service instead. Or maybe autonomous taxis will be reserved for emerging markets e.g. Indonesia which are more relaxed about parking.
I take Uber and Lyft in NYC multiple times per week. No one ever “parks”, they just pull up, you jump in, and off you go. Takes less than a minute in most cases, doesn’t block traffic, and I suspect it virtually never results in a ticket. Maybe if they sit there for 10 minutes or more, but that’s exceedingly rare. And even then, they’re not going to get a ticket outside a few ultra-congested areas of manhattan that make up a tiny fraction of this city. Even in most places in manhattan, you could sit in a running car in a no parking zone for hours without getting a ticket. I had a moving truck up on the curb on the Upper West Side in a no parking zone for hours and the NYPD rolled past several times without a glance.
Also, this is exactly how taxis all work too, btw, which seems to undermine your entire point.
Similar laws simply aren't present in most other cities. Stopping in the middle of the road to pick up passengers is illegal and drivers do it since the police are never there. Hence my point that Uber would never program this illegality into their self driving algorithm.
The vast majority of pickups in nyc at least are not illegal under any current law.
Drivers own the liability for illegal parking. Autonomous cars would make the developer liable.
No government is going to tolerate systemic and wide spread violation of the law.
It's just like self driving cars will go a bit over the speed limit if that is the flow of traffic. If they don't, then the laws will be adjusted. It would be silly to indefinitely hold back a huge industry because humans get to exploit legal loopholes but machines don't.
Autonomous cars won't have the same algorithm as selfish humans to position themselves.
A human will go to one of the busy places and will probably drive back to the original point of pickup.
While a computer will be notified ( 1 car only parked on the busy place) and immediately replaced by a new available/nearby car. Making the process more efficient, more remote places will be handled faster. Busy places more efficient.
Not all cabs will need to earn money, since the biggest expense will be the car driving and not the human driver ( waiting for work).
And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine, some companies even negotiate it because of the sheer amount.
Up until the point they are banned.
Everyone, especially lawmakers, are pretty sick of tech companies breaking the law in order to be "disruptive". As we've seen recently with all of the e-scooter bans.
Scooter bans were mostly because it was disruptive having a staple of scooters in the middle of the pedestrian road and they were consistently breaking the rules.
Ps. We do similar stuff for cities at our company. So I don't need an externzl source for this currently.
Anyway, "people are willing to break the law but companies aren't" seems a really weird reason to stick with the status quo over something far more efficient.
Studies have shown that the growth in Uber/Lyft has increased traffic congestion. This system autonomously will be even worse.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlo...
They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they can significantly reduce energy consumption requirements for vehicle usage.
Self driving cars can plan the whole exchange, negotiate (or be directed by an intersection controller) to decelerate, align, merge, and maintain high throughout at low latency. ATC does this for planes already; we have the coordination technology. It’s just about getting drivers to listen to precise instructions without deviation. For everywhere I know of, that’s going to take automation.
Reading up on standing waves taught me a lot; you might like adding that wrinkle to your model.
So if AVs can't increase the throughput of city streets, I'm skeptical that they can increase the throughput of off-ramps which are bounded by city streets, or urban freeway segments which are bounded by the off-ramps. And even imagining that significant (2x?) throughput is achieved, it's not going to meet the induced demand ceiling; there would be the same amount of congestion, only with more cars.
L5 is dead on arrival as congestion-mitigation technology and I hope at least some of the billions earmarked to be spent on researching and deploying it are redirected towards better walking, cycling, and transit amenities instead.
Neither would they have to operate at artificially handicapped speeds, as no human operator would really be able to keep up regardless with the 10,000 or 100,000 cars running around.
Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).
There's no reason so far here that self-driving vehicles can't improve traffic and overall throughput, and it's a bold claim to declare L5 dead on arrival.
Follow distances in urban areas with low speeds are already really small. I don't think AVs would make them meaningfully tighter.
> Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).
This was supposed to be what Waze and Google Maps were set to achieve, and they did not, but they did piss off a lot of people when cut-through drivers started jamming up their formerly quiet residential neighborhoods.
That's only going to work on roads that are AI-only.
I don’t see an AI requirement to be a huge hurdle for those cities.
In modern Western urban planning, large car-capacity streets aren't considered a good thing to be running through urban areas anyways. Most of the large cities (Paris, Berlin, New York) are taking steps to reduce road widths to more equally distribute the road between pedestrians, cyclists and transit users. As it turns out, building pedestrian overpasses at a convenient enough spacing for pedestrians is extremely expensive.
Imagine highway where everyone drives 80mph with 5ft of distance between cars. No one suddenly changes lanes, no one suddenly slows down for no reason.
Here is illustration from Waymo testing facility: https://youtu.be/hKfEivMfDPU
https://www.geotab.com/blog/traffic-congestion/
Given the same number of cars on the road, a self-driving fleet would eliminate many mechanical failures and many human failures, and be able to adapt to sub-optimal infrastructure at a network-wide level.
Infrastructure would also be easier or more efficient to improve, because you'd have removed much of the human variability that makes identifying choke points difficult.
They might even Uber to the train station then Uber from the destination train station to work. Lots of ways of cutting traffic!
The people who are driving, or at least a significant portion of them, pick driving over public transport because of perceived privacy and control.
I don't think uptake of shared mobility is going to be so popular where that becomes the norm.
Also I drive because it's faster, and because once you go from A->B getting to B->C is probably easier. Not for privacy. Most people just need to get to work or school or their kids to school for the bulk of their car use. Kids to school might work by sharing with other parents you know.
Most Americans don't really need an SUV or a pickup; a minivan or a sedan are more practical. Yet most Americans are buying them, because it makes them feel better about what they're driving and they want to show off. You may only take your car to the grocery store, but if you meet Becky from PTA in the parking lot and she has a really nice car that she owns, that's still a big deal.
Unless the ownership cost of a car were to spike significantly, this part of American culture seems hard to change, particularly when automakers spend lots of money making sure that Americans see premium gas-guzzlers as status symbols.
- selfishness eg stopping or parking in no parking zones, driving aggressively
- error eg causing accidents
- ignorance eg not knowing the traffic flow in an intersection, driving slowly to find your bearings.
Also, if we have fewer cars, but higher utilisation of vehicles then we will require less parking.
AI doesn't really have the power to change that, and might actually be worse depending on how it reacts to pedestrians and cyclists.
Half of the work on "self"-driving is actually traffic dispatch.
The value in the 95/95 autopilot is because it will make commercial drivers be able to never need breaks (they sleep or rest until the autopilot is in trouble, and they can even remote control cars). And of course because a lot of people seem to hate driving and would pay to avoid it.
I don’t - I hate owning a car.
A car that can only drive within major cities in the UK and on motorways would be entirely fine for the vast majority of people. Exceptional journies I can always rent a car that suits my needs for the one week in several years I'm in the Highlands.
People will abuse that. They will get high/drunk/whatever and when that “5%” rolls around (quite unexpectedly mind you), they’ll run into a bus full of nuns. Always assume people will be judgement impaired because “the car can drive itself”....
But, this is also why I think the next car manufacturer race will be about who can solve this for their customers. That is, who solves the problem of making 95% autonomous cars able to drive in 99.9% if all situations without manual intervention by the driver, where the provides automatic remote control from massive rooms full of people steering drunk car owners out of situations the autopilot couldn’t. The better the autonomy, the fewer people needed to remote override.
Given that planes, which rely on a class of specifically trained professionals with minimum hour requirements, still have issues with this from time to time, I don't think this is a realistic thing for cars.
Driving standards, at least in the US, are very low, and raising them is a hard problem.
Most of this issues come from the fact that planes can't just stop in the middle of the road and wait for help, they have to land somewhere and do it fast enough not to be out of fuel.
Cars don't have to drive themselves to nearest service center when they encounter any hardware malfunction, they can just stop and unload passengers. Self-driving company would use another car to drive you to your destination (not even necessary self-driving car).
The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived. Probably a good thing considering how low the bar is right now for road safety. Being killed by a robot's mistake is perceived far worse than by human error.
I think a middle ground like autopilot on the highway could significantly improve safety while still accommodating perception issues.
I don't think so. Airplane autopilot automates away the safe, boring parts of air travel, much like highway driving, so in that sense I agree with you. Truly autonomous landing is still a big deal, and planes that the benefit of ATC, and I don't think there are any planes that taxi or takeoff autonomously. Furthermore, accidents involving autopilot are always at the edge, when control changes from computer to human unexpectedly or when the human has to take over the autopilot in less than ideal conditions. I don't think there's much perception in the public eye of "robot pilots killing people"
I think once autonomous driving accidents go through the courts a few times, the same will happen to cars. After another decade of development and legislation, people will die not because the robot made a mistake per-se, but because it encountered a situation it can't cope with and the human wasn't ready to take over in an emergency, or because the robot tried to cope with the emergency situation the wrong way and the human didn't notice in time and took over too late (if at all). This may still sound like the computer making a mistake, but the subtle difference is that the mistake is made in an extraordinary situation, as opposed to the current accidents that happened in regular driving conditions. I think this subtle distinction will be enough for the PR people to spin the blame away from the manufacturer.
Call my cynical, but I can also see successful lobbying efforts in the future by corporations to reduce liability in class-4 and lower autonomous car accidents involving unusual situations, citing the fact that the driver should have been paying attention and taken over.
That aside, road safety is better than ever these days, with a lot of what would have been fatal accidents being merely property damage due to modern safety systems, and highway driving is probably the safest kind of driving out there, thus it is not clear to me (and I have no data either way, I don't think a study has ever been done) that current offerings (Tesla et al.) are any safer compared to similarly priced modern luxury cars per mile driven, and I'm not sure that will change in the future. The only reason I see for adopting highway autopilot is not safety but comfort. You might argue that comfort contributes to safety and enables longer driving times, but driving for 8 to 12 hours is pretty safe regardless, and I don't think I could do more than that even if I was a passenger.
This is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I don't think we will see a meaningful reduction in fatal accidents or serious injuries due to self-driving cars for a long time, but I do think we will see a reduction in accidents involving only property damage or minor injuries from low to medium speed accidents, and I see a sharp decrease in parking-lot scrapes and dings in the near future. Low to medium speed streets and tight maneuvers is where I see most "bad" human drivers have the most trouble and already things like parallel parking assist are a godsend to these people.
If anything, I think your example underlines just how valuable and realistic this is for cars.
Full autonomy was always, IMHO, a silly pipe dream. But that doesn't mean that there isn't tremendous value -- in terms of safety, time, money and environment -- to partial autonomy.
I interpret the stats the other way. Cars are not planes and driving involves constant encounters with potential collisions and which would make level 5 too difficult technically and socially rendering them too costly to be valuable.
But one needs to plan and book a travel in advance. There are also capacity limits.
The way, the channel, the [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit)
all there to calculate whodunit in advance, this is no Voodoo, just calm glance at what is there, to not get stuck, that would suck, and be unfair.
Bricks from bridges could kill people and just damages regular people's property. It's just different.
that to me is something automakers can easily cooperate with governments to get done and done well. they already mark HOV and Express lanes and with federal legislated lane markings it would make automating those drives pretty simple. Then as the number of cars increase the number of free drive lanes is decreased until the vanish.
using metro Atlanta as an example express lanes have their own entrance and exit points so they are already separated. One set for I75 is wholly elevated two lane bridge work nearly the full length of its run.
Tesla Model 3 owner, I think even Musk is walking back what he "implies" as self driving. As into self driving with human oversight
This way, you can set out home with cars and you only operate the last part going to Cities for work. And when you leave you drive out to high way and then every full else will be automatics. It also partly solve housing problems and people can now live further away from work.
Surely this is a solution that is simply enough for the short term. What am I missing here?
A 90% autonomous trip where I have to pay attention 100% of the time gets me no real value. It's just a slightly nicer, maybe, ride.
It seems unlikely you commutes would completely autonomous even people commute on freeways.
Self-driving cars that only go 80% of the way would compete against those forms of transportation which have established business models, networks and in the case of trains are subsidized in a way that self-driving cars likely won't ever be.
Additionally the key advantage of cars is flexibility, not having to figure out how to get to or from the train station or airport. In your scenario self-driving cars would lack this advantage.
Now granted this may still sound like an appealing proposition in countries with poor public transportation infrastructure but that substantially reduces the size of the overall market. Sure this might be attractive for the US but what about Europe? Asia?
Now of course there is an obvious answer to this problem: Keep the steering wheel and drive the rest of the way yourself. That just means you'll have a lot of drivers who won't gain experience at the current rate though. Not sure I would like to share the road with those people.
To the extent cost is a a factor, it's unnecessarily high due to these aforementioned issues[1]. So I don't think money invested into self-driving cars hurts trains and rail infrastructure.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
In the US, trains are for freight. It would cost too much to create a new passenger rail network compared to automating existing intercity roads.
Now, increasing the throughput of rail using self-driving trains could make a bundle in the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system... [3] https://www.railwaygazette.com/australasia/rio-tinto-complet...
It would be the end of owned cars, huge reduction of car production, millions of jobs in the transportation business amortized, to name just a few.
Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving.
If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when those conditions aren't met), then at least 80% of the value is there.
Wrestling with the harder edges of the problem is still the right thing to do for tolerance reasons, but I hope we don't have to see last-mile problems solved before we start reaping the benefits.