No whereas with Waze it is a lot more aggressive and it will take faster routes and shortcuts even if it means taking a gravel road to save 30 seconds.
Why can’t a third party routing software assess safety? It’s not a realistic expectation to expect all roads to be equivalent in safety.
Even if you agree with that, it's still not the governments responsibility to make all possible routes exactly equally safe. (That's actually not possible, for any non-zero level of risk.)
So even if the overall risk was low and in some sense reasonable, you might still want to pick the less risky route.
Also keep in mind that different people have different risk appetites.
No they aren't. They're being completely transparent about this and giving you the option to keep the old behavior with a one-time settings change. So what's the problem exactly?
I guess maybe I'd like a little bit of say in how the software I use gets updated. I don't know how that would be implemented, but this got me thinking that maybe there is a way that this software thing could be move a little closer towards a partnership than the autocratic "hey we're going to arbitrarily change this piece of software you use frequently". (You can see similar thoughts with people complaining how Big Sur uses more space, or the complaints when GMail changed things to be less dense.)
I'm fine with the feature though as long as it gives an option. In fact, I would enjoy having the new capability to optimize for fuel economy.
It's about network effects. The more people we get to make the more eco-friendly choice, the better the place gets for all of us.
You aren't going to shame me over a few miles when I make a concerted effort to drive 1/10 of the average American, sorry.
But hey good news, Google is abandoning remote work and making its employees drive to and from work every day probably negating any benefit from this feature whatsoever.
If addressing climate change relies on people changing habits against their selfish interests, then we are doomed.
The externality should be internalised with a carbon tax. It's the simple, most obvious solution and it will cause selfish interest and ethical choices to align when it comes to carbon emission.
A tax will always be passed on to the consumer, even if the govt taxes Ford, it will just make the car more expensive.
Using game theory, a question could be "how do we get Ford to make more electric cars, improve efficiency of electric car production, and incentivize them to advertise electric cars?"
My take is that businesses drive change, not consumers. On the whole, consumers are told what they want.
Consumers will see that EVs are cheaper (post-tax) and will switch to EVs as a consequence.
You can make the tax revenue neutral.
Consumer want cars (and appliances in general) that, all else being equal, are cheaper to own and use.
With a carbon tax, Ford can decide whether they want to offer more efficient ICE or electric cars to reach that goal.
(And consumers can decide whether to use any of these options that Ford offers, or to just drive less.
Or, for some, to just suck up the cost and drive the same as before.)
That's one outcome, but not the only one. Things like emission taxation make sense, even if there's no remediation financed with the proceeds.
See eg the sulphur dioxide emissions cap and trade program. (https://voxeu.org/article/lessons-climate-policy-us-sulphur-...) I don't think they used the proceeds to fund sulphur dioxide capture.
> This is possibly meaning different mode of transport, some things maybe remote, bicycles, trains, others.
Yes, exactly. Also: just forgoing some trips. Or driving more efficiently etc.
*This has since been repealed, a decision I strongly disagree with.
I'd want to put driving-less on similar footing to buying a fancier car.
A carbon tax does that automatically with no extra bureaucracy.
(I'm all for taking the proceeds of a carbon tax and distributing them equally amongst all voters, if you want to make the whole thing revenue neutral for both the government and the 'average' consumer.)
Actually, you do. Your environmental values happen to be efficiency (Km/hour) trumps efficiency (Km/gram of CO2). You wish the software to continue to express only your environmental values. It is an activist stance nonetheless.
Do something much more likely to be useful: implement a reasonable, even revenue-neutral carbon tax and stop with this non-sense.
The second part of your comment, seems to assume only one kind of action is possible. Others might say, great let's do both.
On its face, this argument is clearly wrong. "Absolutely nothing", is not equivalent to extremely little. Especially when, as in the case of Google Maps, there is a large multiplier.
Elections are a different beast. Assuming first-past-the-post system where impact is only at the margin (50.0001%).
Whereas direct action on CO2 production is incremental. We can argue it's not enough, but we cannot argue it is literally nothing.
It makes sense to look at these things normalised per-capita.
So for Google, making a small change has a big impact per-Googler, but it's still a small change per-capita.
Making a small per-capita change is still a small change overall.
"small changes alone are not enough" -> "only big changes can work" -> "small change X ought not to be undertaken"
To me parts of this looks like the fallacy of the excluded middle. To claim that X has some merit is not to claim that X on its own has sufficient merit. I apologise if you are not making such an argument, but throwawayboise and arsome certainly seem to have been. And such arguments are far from uncommon.
I do see your point about scale and multipliers but I believe efforts like these are important not only for their admittedly small yet not negligible impact, but also to help establish a foundation for the next steps that should be taken.
In the eighties, the cost-effectiveness of wind-power was way off the charts. However, you'd quantify it. Per turbine, per $, per power consumer. Turbines were just small and inefficient with few deployments. Now, many incremental improvements later, the same technology is in the right ballpark. It's a good thing those pioneers like Vestas didn't just give up when the absolute impact seemed far too small.
I agree that this is wrong.
To make small changes do a lot, you have to have a lot of them.
You can still judge small changes by how much bang they provide for the buck. (Or more formally, employ the standard marginalist framework of economics.) A small impact is fine, if the cost was small, too.
Wind-power (and other renewables) are a bit complicated too judge on these historic efficiency measures, because there was so much government interference.
(I think government should perhaps tax CO2 and other emissions, but not offer any subsidies. I want eg turning the lights on less be on the same footing as switching to 'green' energy suppliers.)
(I also don't think the government subsidies for wind and photovoltaic actually helped that much in the long run. Eg as you can see, once the subsidies ran out, the photovoltaic industry mostly left Germany for China.)
Since you have seemingly already abandoned google maps due to their activism before reading this story, what were the other reasons that made you quit?
The faster you go, the more your fuel efficiency decreases. For the most part this is due to wind resistance, because there is a velocity^2 argument there(ie if you double your velocity, you quadruple your wind resistance). Your engine is also designed to operate more efficiently at certain speeds but that is less directly quantifiable than wind resistance.
So you might be able to get 40MPG while doing a steady 40 mph, but only get 20MPG when doing 80mph.
So if you need to go 40 miles, if you can do it at 80mph it will take you 30 minutes, and will cost you 2 gallons of fuel. If you do it at 40mph it will take you 1 hour and cost you 1 gallon of fuel. So in this contrived example the longer trip has a lower carbon footprint.
In the real world, there are rarely two parallel roads going exactly the same place but just with a different speed limit. Usually you need to drive out of your way to get onto a highway to make your trip go faster. On the other hand driving directly at a slower speed usually entails more starts/stops at traffic lights which eats into your fuel efficiency. Google is probably in a good place to answer the question of how fuel efficient is a given route because they have so much data about average speeds, accelerations/decelerations required/ etc.
High petrol prices automatically discourage speeding. (Just as a carbon tax would.)
Of course, the US also had price controls on petrol. And the ensuing long queues and fights at the petrol station.
Their anarcho-capitalist utopian neighbour [1] to the north did not enact price controls for petrol, and subsequently did not see any queues or fights.
[1] Only half joking here: in many respects Canada is more what we'd call neoliberal today than the US. Compare also https://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/29/there-was-no-place-like-can...
For example, a super-fast route that's up an extremely-steep incline on the way may technically be faster from point A to B, but would be less carbon efficient than taking a slightly-longer route that is flatter.
What's really eating into your battery in a way you can't recover with regenerative breaking ever is wind resistance.
Routes that make you drive faster for longer cost more energy. (And given the way wind resistance works, for the same average speed, a variable speed is more expensive than a constant one.)
Every 100 feet of elevation change amounts to ~1% of the battery capacity of a Chevy Volt; a couple of small mountains, with lots of ups and downs, and it's easy to lose 5-10% of your range versus taking a more level route, 5% if you brake well, 10% if you brake poorly.
[Which is not to say that hitting the thruway doesn't also kill your range fast.]
As a simple, unimaginative example. I'm sure you can think of others if you put in the time.
On average people won't even notice.
Provide the option, sure. Plenty of people care enough to use it.
But don’t force it on me. I’ll find software that actually wants to serve its purpose.
My personal annoyance: their walking directions assume you don't know parkour and there isn't even an option for that