Lane departure warning systems do exactly that. My mazda does this and basically between smart cruise, lane departure warnings, and big old alarms when someone in front of me suddenly hits the break, driving is SO MUCH MENTALLY EASIER. And don't get me started about blindspot alerts and HUDs oh man so amaze.
I still think Level 2 assist is worse than no assist. But level 1 assist is fucking amazing.
I agree about the parking thing. Its such a novelty thing like "hey hey hey bro check it out" and press a button. "ooooh! Aaaaah" meanwhile I can do the same maneuver in say 10 seconds flat since I've been doing it so long. Honestly maybe in 10 years the feature will be so smooth people will question how to even park without it, like rear cameras.
In Boston they're trying to connect North Station and South Station, a distance of about 5 miles. The cost is at least $10 billion.
Also, I would expect at least a few cost overruns.
The extreme mental gymnastics some people will go to to rationalize the current state of the world absolutely blows my mind.
That's still about 5 years of the total raised revenue alone to meet the minimum for just this one connector.
Look at China's high speed rail network. Only a small minority of routes manage to break even, and the rest of them are a huge financial burden that the CCP just accepts because achieving a huge engineering feat creates a sense of national pride.
You can have slower cheaper rail infrastructure that serves less traveled routes.
So there is never any economic need to transfer the cost of using the transportation network from those using it, to taxpayers at large. In fact, socializing costs of transportation is what can cause economically non-viable transportation services to consume greater amounts of resources, and in doing so, burden the economy.
> So there is never any economic need to transfer the cost of using the transportation network from those using it, to taxpayers at large.
> So there is never any economic need to transfer the cost of using the education system from those using it, to taxpayers at large. In fact, socializing costs of education is what can cause economically non-viable education services to consume greater amounts of resources, and in doing so, burden the economy.
Your argument is the most basic of libertarian nonsense that would argue that in past decades would argue that tax dollars collected in UT shouldn't fund interstate highways in CA.
What is it about transportation wherein socializing the costs of using it would make it work?
Toll roads work all around the world, and better than the routes where the costs are socialized.
>Yet this same education system is what has produced a society capable of enormous economic output over the relatively short history of public education.
The modern education system arose largely in the 1930' "high school movement", which was almost all locally funded and controlled, and thus subject to very little socializing of costs.
As the costs of providing education have become increasingly socialized, the spending efficiency has decreased as rent-seeking institutions like teachers unions have taken over:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
>Your argument is the most basic of libertarian nonsense that would argue that in past decades would argue that tax dollars collected in UT shouldn't fund interstate highways in CA.
I never made a libertarian argument. I made an appeal to basic economics. That triggered your anti-libertarian ideological defense mechanism, which has been instilled in the populace by the rent-seeking institutions that rely on centralized control:
https://www.hoover.org/research/california-state-government-...
These rent-seeking mechanisms are rapidly taking over the economy:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
And as they do, the belief systems that they rely on, like anti-libertarianism, become more pervasive.
FWIW homeopaths and chiropractors use the same sad defense.
I have nothing else to say but to point at this comment and say that calling a teacher's union a 'rent-seeking institution' is nonsense. As a libertarian you should be cheering for unions because they are the natural consequence of workers using their power in a free market to come together and negotiate as a block.
The evidence, an example of that which I provided, shows that they are.
May I ask if you or your relatives are in a union? If so it may be hard for you to be objective about this.
>As a libertarian you should be cheering for unions because they are the natural consequence of workers using their power in a free market to come together and negotiate as a block.
The unions that exist today are not operating in a free market. They leverage laws that mandate the employer - which in the case of the public sector, is the government - to engage in collective bargaining with them, to the exclusion of all other parties.
This provides them with an extreme barrier to competition from other workers, which in turn allows them to extract economic rent.
Second, the businesses that exist today are not operating in a free market. They leverage laws that allow them to prevent employees from leveraging their ability in engage in collective action. Additionally teachers are not required to join a union; the fact that teachers join the union and engage in collective bargaining is a result of their natural collective power. If there is a refusal to engage in collective bargaining then they can strike, both of which are natural consequences of free market unionization.
I am still not seeing where you are claiming there is 'economic rent' other than the fact that unions exist and you seem to dislike that. Given your post history, that seems to be where you actually lie.
That's a relief. When someone has a financial conflict of interest in how the public perceives a particular political issue, then it becomes very hard to appeal to their reason and objectivity.
>>That will not be an avenue of argument for you.
I'm not looking for an avenue of argument. I'm looking to reach a consensus based on the evidence.
>>Second, the businesses that exist today are not operating in a free market. They leverage laws that allow them to prevent employees from leveraging their ability in engage in collective action
None of that is true. There are no laws that allow them to suppress their employees' ability to engage in collective action. Employees are free to quit, boycott a company, make collective bargaining a condition for their employment, etc. There is no law that deprives them of any of their contracting rights for the benefit of the employer.
I am open to seeing arguments/evidence demonstrating otherwise.
>If there is a refusal to engage in collective bargaining then they can strike, both of which are natural consequences of free market unionization.
1. The law prohibits a company from negotiating with anyone but a union if a majority of a work unit vote to unionize. This prohibition extends to workers who did not vote to unionize, as well as applicants outside of the company's workforce who did not participate in the vote. This law, which the political left celebrates, is a blatant violation of contract liberty.
2. The law prohibits companies from requiring, as a condition of employment, to not unionize. By prohibiting these so-called Yellow Dog contracts, the law also blatantly violates contract liberty.
3. The law prohibits a company from firing workers who strike: if a company hires replacement workers and the strike ends, the company is not only required by law to employ the workers who ended the strike, but to continue employing the replacement workers.
Being restricted from engaging in the hiring replacement workers without conditions restricts the company's free market rights, in order to make it as difficult as possible for companies to disassociate themselves from unions. In a free market, one would be free to disassociate themselves from a union.
>I am still not seeing where you are claiming there is 'economic rent' other than the fact that unions exist and you seem to dislike that.
Unions are able to derive above-market wages by restricting the contracting rights of the employer to negotiate with parties other than themselves. I've already explained that and you seemingly totally ignored me, which is concerning, given it make the prospects of a rational discussion quite dim.
Unions extracting economic rents is a very widely studied and well understood phenomenon:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=coll...
>Transportation is a service that's critical to economic function.
Transportation is not amongst the subset of goods/services where having individual market actors pay for its production leads to economically sub-optimal under-production.
Whether transportation should be subsidized for other reasons is an entirely different subject.
I don't understand, could you elaborate?
Similarly, time preferences can stop long-term beneficial activities by corporate actors.
In the end, it is about bridging different preferences.
The main issues I have are that the trips aren’t as frequent as I’d like and often don’t leave on time.
Like many people, I cross a train track on my commute. There even used to be a commuter rail line that stopped there. Now it is all freight.
Like many freight lines, it carries a lot of "bomb trains" running oil between the fields and the refineries.
Eventually -- not tomorrow, probably more in the 30-50 year range -- those bomb trains are going to stop running.
That is going to leave a lot of track underutilized, and adding passenger rail back to these lines is one way to keep it cost effective to keep them open for freight. You have some overhead to re-add minimal stations -- concrete pads for disembarking, roofs optional -- but the tracks already existing covers a lot of the cost and complications.
The Toyota CH-R my wife had did that. Above 50 km/h / 30mph the steering wheel would gently "shake" if you tried to switch lanes without using your blinker.
Several brands/models offer that, sadly sometimes as an extra (FWIW I think it should be illegal to offer that as an extra: it should either come stock or not be offered at all... Safety features shouldn't be something you need to pay for).
It's not at all self-driving though.
I also enjoyed the side mirrors indicating (using some kind of yellow LED) when there was a vehicle in the blind spot.
Our Bronco Sport has this (steering wheel vibration) in addition to lane assist. I don't like the latter, so I appreciate that I can enable/disable the two modes independently.
I know it's way more stuff for them to test, but being able to enable/disable individual features is so huge. My blind-spot warning on my Mazda is super sensitive (plus I drive mostly in traffic so any time I put my turn signal on there is a car next to me). I want to be able to turn it off, but since it uses the same sensors as my RCTA, they can only be enabled/disable together. I love the RCTA, so I just have learned to ignore the beeping that invariably happens every time I signal...
I fail to see how that is relevant to computer vision
There was some speculation that because they shift gears manually, they have to pay more attention to the road and can't do things like drink coffees while driving. They also enjoy driving a lot more than we do.
I wonder if other technology would have a similar effect of ultimately making driving less safe and enjoyable. I've never driven a super-modern car, but I do know that I zone out a bit when cruise control is on...
That said, after driving the same vehicle for a while, at least for me, I can usually guess how fast I’m going.
I am highly skeptical of this. I am sure auto insurers in the US have looked at the statistics, and if it were true, they would be charging higher premiums for automatics than manuals.
edit: link from State Farm, a large US insurer. https://www.statefarm.com/simple-insights/auto-and-vehicles/....
Studies haven't really shown which transmission type is safer. Automatic and CVT transmissions do allow you to keep both hands on the wheel at all times, while manual transmissions may require more attentive driving. Your driving habits will play a large role in your safety. Safety features available for both automatic and manual vehicles can make a difference, too.
Jokes aside, as a data scientist of a long career, I don’t share your skepticism. It would be a hilariously easy task to extract this information from the data with the variables involved and the records insurance companies are able to keep.
Really? In order to pass the test you have to pass the theory test which is just about knowing the rules of the road. Yes many experienced drivers wouldn't always pass it first time, especially when it has been a long time they got their license and laws have changed but you get it quite easily by just ready the "rulebook" and do trial tests at your driving schools until you pass tests. It is no different than passing any easy test as a student.
As for the practice, you get something like mandatory 20 to 30hours with an instructor. And most of it is just about applying the rules you already know by having passed the test above. It takes less than a handful of hours to master clutch and gearbox, same for parallel parking, rest is applying the priority rules and showing the instructor...and then the examiner that you apply them and give a quick look in all directions and your blind zone whenever you change lane or direction. It is more about feeling comfortable and confident on the car than learning really.
In the US I just went there and passed it on the spot. Super easy. No way anyone with half a brain could fail it.
Then I just drove with my gf who already had the driver license (legal in the US). Took 2 hours of lessons. 2 weeks later I was passing the test.
I'd rather have one of those people who drive distracted crash into my parked car than on my lawn.
Children are not mindless suicide machines; they learn at a tremendous rate from their environment. The children you see around you might not survive on my street, but that's because they haven't lived there for all of their lives.
It barely takes any mental energy to drive manual. After you learn it it's just not a big deal.
I drink coffee whilst driving.
Main difference is that American roads are big, grid layout, traffic light to runway to traffic light style things. UK roads weave inbetween buildings. It requires more attention.
I don't have any numbers regarding sales, but after renting 10s of cars in Europe during the last decade, it seems like they almost never have any manual cars anymore. In some countries, the entire fleet doesn't even include any manual ones anymore, I was told the last time I wanted to rent a car.
I don't know, anecdotally, all my friends (besides me, if I count as a friend of mine) drive automatic.
> and you can’t get a driver’s license if you don’t know how to drive one.
This is definitely not true in a bunch of countries, where you get to chose if to take a license for manual or automatic, where if you chose manual you can drive both and if you chose automatic, you obviously only get to drive automatic ones.
Just now I went to Avis.com set pick up in Rome tomorrow, drop off in Rome the day after, and it said there are 6 types of cars available, and 5 of those types have manual transmissions.
Florence was incredibly calm, respectful and considerate driving. The Motorways everyone was doing just under the speed limit.
My italian friends said that its not the case in the north.
For the ones that do, I would guess they have more leniency than 5%, but I don't know.
Something like 60% to 80% of new cars in European countries are now sold with automatic transmission. And this figure is growing year to year. It will take a decade or two for the old manual cars to get replaced, though.
I've also spend quite a bit time in US driving. EU is safer as narrower streets/lanes and smaller number of lanes (on highways), closer parked cars and pedestrians/bicycles forces you to pay much more attention.
That's just not true. If you cannot do that, you won't get your driver's license in most countries.
It is no problem at all to drink coffee or even eat while driving a manual car, so no idea where this comes from ;)
Of course, US is a big country and my perception could be not very typical. Extrapolating from one data point is dangerous. It's like comparing driving in Naples and Amsterdam. Both are Europe, but the driving experience is fairly dissimilar.
I don't think its the gears, Its a combination of education. You have to pass a reasonably intense exam that requires coaching and also pass written test (unless you're Belgium, although that might have changed)
Moreover road laws tend to be much more strictly enforced. And not just parking laws.
Most European countries have far higher barriers to entry for driver's licenses compared to the USA. A German driver's license costs around $2000 to obtain. I spent $2000 on my first car (in 2018). Combine high financial barrier with competent public transit, and people who would be bad drivers just don't drive at all.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I want public transportation infrastructure and far, far, FAR fewer cars. I think the US should strive to reduce car ownership by 75% over the next 20 years, at least in cities over a certain population size. I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars. But I'm also a grown-up of a certain age and realize the bright-eyed 20-somethings don't understand the meaning of the word "consequences".
We need high speed rail to connect our cities.
Town centers will soon be inaccessible by car, so they'll still need public transport occasionally for that.
If they have a pre-existing medical condition: sure, they can use an alternative method of transportation.
If they don't want to walk for 10 minutes, they're bound to have a medical condition soon-ish.
But hey, you got yours so who cares about others, right?
Perhaps we need to slow down a bit, in general?
I agree with your point in general, I'm just quibbling that speed is the decider.
(And yes, all of this means that Tesla and most other traditional automotive company's stated commercial strategy for self driving makes little sense)
A fully autonomous car (however unrealistic it may be) would be a game changer simply for the economics alone. Not paying full tax, insurance etc for a vehicle while retaining all of the transport possibility would be incredibly tempting to anyone on a budget. Not having to build housing with parking included could do great things for housing availability.
I’m not saying any of this will happen but fully autonomous cars definitely would open the door to a lot of opportunities.
Car sharing (short term rental) services already exist and can be a great option for childless young people who live in a dense city and seldom leave it. We don't need autonomous vehicles to make such services work. But they're totally unsuitable for how most Americans actually live. Like am I supposed to summon a shared vehicle every time I need to take one of my children to sports practices or games and hope it actually shows up promptly? And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster? The whole concept is just totally impractical regardless of the economics.
Everyone needs to go to school or sports practice at about the same time, everyone wants to go out on Friday nights and not Monday nights, everyone needs a car for monthly shopping at around the end of the month and everyone takes their vacation at around the same time each year due to school vacations.
When demand goes up, not only will it cost more, but there is no guarantee that you'll even get a car on time.
Uber and suchlike work currently because almost everyone uses them rarely, not four times a day.
I would expect self driving car to have much higher utilization most of the time. In addition you have people who can't/don't want to drive and would be able to use the service.
Driving children to activities is hardly a "corner case". It's bizarre how disconnected many HN users are from how regular middle class Americans live. Very few married couples with children would be able to manage with one car; they often need to go different places.
> And what if I need to evacuate the family in a natural disaster?
When I said it's a corner case but pasted the wrong sentence.
> You're really missing the point. It won't actually be cheaper except for the few customers who rely mostly on public transportation.
Am I? Why would you not expect it to become cheaper overtime? Uber/etc. needs human drivers who need to be paid and car sharing is inefficient because because most cars end up somewhere where none needs them unless there is continuous bidirectional traffic which is pretty rare. Self driving in theory would solve both these issues.
> Very few married couples with children would be able to manage with one car; they often need to go different places.
Yes well they could in theory get two separate self-driving taxis they don't have to always stay in the same car together.
Ride sharing services are amenable to network affects. I.e. they tend to end in monopoly. And monopolies are not known for reducing costs for the customer. If some effective regulation could counter the network effect, i.e. make it easier and cheaper to switch between different sevices, then a monopoly could be avoided.
Are they? Currently it's a low margin business with no real moat. It's hard to maintain high market share without continues subsidies.
> make it easier and cheaper to switch between different sevices
What barriers and/or costs are there for consumers which would make it difficult for them to switch between different services?
This is a purely political decision that does not depend on the availability of autonomous vehicles. It won't happen because it would reduce property prices.
Autopilots immediately get rid of that so I would disagree and argue the less humans the better. Have fun playing around with the "politeness" lever for example:
Traffic lights are a bitch, changing lanes is inevitable, incidents are inevitable.
That adds up very quickly, and when you consider the presence of intersections and traffic lights, you aren't dealing with an isolated roadway where cars just...drive. There are very real limits on how many cars you can stuff in a given stretch of road without radically redesigning roads in a way that makes them entirely unusable for pedestrians and cyclists (i.e. replacing traffic lights with slot-based intersections[0]), meaning there's an upper limit to how much self-driving cars can limit congestion under the most optimistic scenarios.
When self-driving cars eventually manage to take hold, no one reasonably expects car traffic not to increase. Right now, you park your car and do things. There's no real opportunity cost, because you can't be two places at once. When your car can drive around on its own, there's now a real opportunity cost. If it can earn money for you with no human present, there's going to be a massive incentive to let it do so. Stores will use self-driving delivery vehicles--either their own or as part of their own delivery sharing services--for deliveries.
Will there hopefully be big improvements in pedestrian safety and decreased accidents? I think so, though they certainly won't eliminate either. But there will be an incredible amount of increased traffic that goes along with it.
Demand might also go up.
Taxis are too expensive in most of the developed world to be that ubiquitous. But they aren’t uncommon in countries where labor is cheaper, which makes me wonder if robo-taxis in the developed world will be as common as human taxis in the developing world.
If you try to scale up ride sharing vehicles so they carry more people, you now have to build specialized vehicles that make multi-stop trips where you pick up multiple parties on-demand and drop them off at their individual locations. You've now eliminated the advantages of ride-sharing or taxis--they pick you up where you want and take you directly where you want to go--and managed to recreate a smaller bus. Let's call it a small, self-driving minibus that's not a bus system but a ride share system.
Only it's much worse than a bus, because bus routes are optimized in a way that vehicles picking up and dropping off passengers at what amounts to random locations on-demand never can be. Plus, you're adding even more vehicles to the road in addition to all the other self-driving cars that are running around making deliveries, looking for parking or running off to the outskirts of the city to kill some time as they wait for their human passenger to summon them again, or hustling to try to pick up passengers to make some money for their owners.
Heck, you can't even have them drive on access-limited busways or bus lanes because, by their very nature, they can't stick to dedicated routes.
Consider this: the Siemens S700 streetcar carries over two-hundred people in its usual configuration[0] with a length of just under 95 feet, or the equivalent of around ~6 cars that are almost bumper-to-bumper and trams can be built to be autonomous.
Self-driving cars have their benefits, but they're not an alternative to actual public transport solutions no matter how we try to dress them up. In the end, and as others have pointed out elsewhere in recent years, every new transit idea eventually boils down to a train. Or, in this case, an actual bus.
0. https://assets.new.siemens.com/siemens/assets/api/uuid:3ce5a...
I've only seen this as a 'just so' greenwash pr story from the automotive industry to offset the projected 300% increase in total road miles driven anually. Please explain why peole would be compelled to ditch their multidude of private cars just because they now come with a 24/7 free driver included?
We’re really going to spend billions and billions on further car infrastructure, more reduction in space-constrained cities towards pedestrian and bike infrastructure, and even the displacement of existing homes and communities for… empty cars?! If it weren’t so depressing, it’s a perfect indictment of the US’s car culture taken full circle.
- regarding my city (Paris) most sides are literally full of parked empty cars. I don't have the data but anywhere you go - apart the biggest boulevards and walkable very-inner-center - you'll see way more parked cars than driving ones. Indeed, 50% of space is allocated to cars while they represent 13% of the commutes [1].
- Vehicle occupancy was 1.5 in 2019 and is declining (US) [0].
0 https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/perso...
1 (fr) https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2016/11/30/a-pa...
Presumably the car is going to pick someone up. That means it isn't parked being useless. If this starts working at scale, supply and demand will pull ridesharing costs down in a way that reduces ownership.
"Because owning a car is expensive."
That hasn't stopped families from getting multiple cars thus far, so why should that change?
"And owning a self-driving car is likely to be even more expensive."
I sincerely doubt that. Just think of all the potential for selling services and preload deals on what is basically a rolling networked computer with the user literally captured inside. You might have to pay more if you want the non-add supported version or the one without the bundled subscriptions.
1. Renting a car will become much more convenient. I can summon a car instead of having to search one 3 blocks away.
2. Selling a car with an L5-autopilot will have to include a manufacturer warranty/insurance in cases of crashes resulting from a fault of the autopilot. Tesla is already charging 10k (or 15k?) for their shitty self-driving-gimmick without a warranty. I expect L5-autopilots to cost much more and even come at a yearly subscription (which basically offsets the insurance and the required continued development). I don't expect the average person will (be able to) pay that subscription, when the far more reasonable solution is to rent a car.
This would be no different than cancelling the whole train or train route; & stopping or cancelling one's entrance pass to train station.
What's that? Silence?
I didn't even mention these which are likely far from the priority or realistic, what about one day shipping?
[0] https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-the-worst-for-ca...
When the US contained major manufacturing, it was efficient to have large suburban sprawl - you could build spread out industrial hubs on the outskirts of town.
When the cities were not safe, it did not matter what you said - people left.
"Efficiency" is not a magic word, it has to apply to a particular resource, and does have to consider all costs. Cities are in fact, more efficient in terms of transit costs (of all types).
Most of the people on HN seem to be city-dwelling pro centralization and centralized control. It seems to be jarring for them to see their own policies of openly promoting the destruction of others lives and way of living directed back at them.
Pol pot? Is that you?
> It seems to be jarring for them to see their own policies of openly promoting the destruction of others lives
Says someone who just proposed mass extermination of billions of people?
a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030092 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27030081 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25573631 (Dec 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24145979 (Aug 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17274402 (June 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16938001 (April 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16737173 (April 2018)
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
It may be true that city life is more efficient per capita, but the total population increase overcomes those efficiencies.
If you think their lives are resource and energy efficient now, wait until they don't even exist anymore.
I don't think there's a productive conversation here anymore, clearly you have some personal vendetta against cities based on some rural experiences you've had.
People talk about the goal of destroying rural and suburban life through policy all the time. If you found it jarring for someone to openly advocate for the destruction of your way of living, maybe take that into consideration.
> If you found it jarring for someone to openly promote the destruction of your way of living, maybe take that into consideration.
No because you are advocating for an equivalence which, to my knowledge, does not exist.
Even ostensibly pedestrian friendly cities don’t have sufficient political willpower to hand street space over to other modes of transit at anything resembling a fast enough rate. Everything needs to sit in a “pilot” for two years before action is taken.
“The best we can do”? Autonomous driving does nothing to help anything in any way at all.
What are you even talking about?
Cities like San Antonio, TX with its Riverwalk and Atlanta with its Beltline not only show every other city a path towards walkable and sustainable future but also how a city can invest tens of millions in walkable infrastructure that yields billions in economic investment and development.
Also, I don't have a car so I've been taking bus, train, plane, and occasional car rental to travel between towns and cities. Recently I've started taking buses. What I've discovered is that I can get on the bus in the morning, plug in my phone and laptop to AC power, and using my mobile hot spot work all day while on the bus. The buses travel on interstate highways which have excellent continuous mobile service. Amtrak trains are awful for working because lack of stable internet connection.
Furthermore the river walk was built in the 1930s as a way to improve property values, and remodeled a handful of times over the decades, that's not a recent innovation
Proposing that autonomous driving is the only way forward sounds pretty sad to me as it doesn't solve the main issue with cars: their environmental impact.
I didn't mean it would be easy to do, nor that it is decently doable to use public transportation in these cities' current state. Sorry if it came out that way.
Doesn't mean a transition is easy or cheap. Nor will it be quick. After spending years and years both in the US and Western Europe, I wish for a healthy mix of cars and public transport. As it stands, this means significantly and heavily reducing cars in high density settlements where public transport is already sufficient or generally viable in the future.
I absolutely love cars and driving but I despise them in city centers. So much property could be regained to improve the daily lives of millions of people in various ways. There is a multitude of projects which have shown how successful this approach is.
One such project is the ban of cars from the Jungfernstieg area in Hamburg. 5 years ago you would walk along Jungernstieg and hundreds of cars would pass by, especially young men showing off their shitty, loud, tuned Mercedes CLAs to everyone. Then the city reduced access for cars there upon popular request and repurposed some lanes for plants and bicycles.
It took a while until people understood [1] but eventually they did. All sources in German.
Before (4-lane road): https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/verkehr-in-hamburg-fahrverbot-au...
After (intermediate car-reduced): https://www.hamburg.de/pressearchiv-fhh/14369764/2020-09-30-...
Future (cars banned): https://www.hamburg.de/bvm/medien/17154924/2023-05-30-bvm-ju...
[1] https://www.mopo.de/hamburg/autoverkehr-am-jungfernstieg-das...
https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov...
Yanks could do the same if they wanted to, but unfortunately they've been brainwashed into thinking walking is the devil
That being said, I would love it if car reliance was drastically reduced. But it’s not going to happen.
And without a doubt the economy would be just fine in the long run.
It’s survived a depression, WW2, bailing out Europe, Cold War, Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11, Afghanistan and the 2008 crash after all.
The major industrial countries have it. Here is is automakers who fight this, nowadays it is Elon Musk, who distracts with BS single file tunnels (Boring Company pushing Teslas in a tunnel) or hyperloop nonsense.
This needs to be a federal infrastructure along the lines of the federal highway system.
This country lacks the national drive and will, which is impeded by Corporate & affiliates like NADA your local 1% in every county in the US.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/rich-republicans...
Do you want to limit the cars people own or do you want to limit how much cars are used?
I could reduce the number of my cars to 1 and wouldn't be driving any less. Or I could buy more cars and still would not be driving more than I do today (but might be able to choose a smaller more efficient one for a trip).
I live in the UK and public transport is actually very unreliable. Cancellations and delays are frequent, strikes happen a dozen times a year, many services have an hour between trains... public transport will take you much linger to get anywhere and you'll be able to transport much less. The car has been a blessing when shopping.
My experience in Germany is that the trains there are even worse. Every single one was delayed by up to half an hour.
I also want this, but I grew up in LA and thus realize that there are places where this won't happen.
> I don't want any more money invested in self-driving cars.
I would take money invested in self-driving cars over money "invested" in public transit in wildly inefficient ways that's less investment and more waste.
The problem with the position that money should go to transit instead of self-driving cars is that transit is a largely intractable problem because it's a political one, where self-driving cars are very much not an intractable problem because they're a technical one.
40,000+ people die every year in the US in car accidents. Self-driving cars have the potential to stop many of those deaths (and the injuries not counted in that). Investment in public transit, when you consider the practical realities, largely doesn't. I understand why folks prefer public transit as a solution, but self-driving cars will be a lifesaving technology, and on that basis they seem clearly worthy of investment.
And this is all doubly true since this isn't government money - it's VCs and private companies putting their cash towards solving a problem that's beneficial towards society. Why hold up public transit as the alternative to self-driving investment when there is absolutely no chance that these dollars would ever go to public transit?
Investing in public transportation is a much more means tested way of reducing traffic accidents. Countries with good public transportation infrastructure have much less traffic deaths per 100k than car focused countries.
Why? Well it makes sense. Public transportation is much more safe all around as you are greatly reducing the amount of people in charge of machines capable of easily killing others.
So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it. Funny that you would consider public transportation a waste of money when looking at the actual data shows it's the most efficient way of moving people.
Selection bias. By definition, you're looking at public transportation that exists. How many traffic accidents have been reduced by the bullet train in CA that has had $80 billion in investment so far? Zero.
> So when you say "investing in self driving cars is investing in saving lives" you are right. It's just a much more inefficient way of doing it.
In the cases in which money can be efficiently deployed, you are correct. But has the $80 billion (let's say that again - $80,000,000,000) spent on the CA bullet been more efficient than $80 billion of spending on self-driving cars? Clearly not.
The problem is that there are limits to how much money you can deploy towards public transit at any reasonable level of efficiency. This is true because of geography, and it's true because of politics. In those places where you can use money well on transit, I fully support it, but once you've exhausted those, you're still going to be left with five figures of traffic deaths a year that can be saved by self driving cars.
Also, you ignored my last paragraph - the comparison of spending money on transit vs. self-driving is not one that makes sense, because the money comes from two different places. VCs don't invest in public transit. Google doesn't invest in public transit.
Self-driving cars are something that will provide a huge societal benefit at no cost to taxpayers. If you're a member of the general public, spending money on public transit is infinitely more inefficient than spending money on self-driving cars, because that transit money could be used to benefit you in other ways, whereas the private funding to self-driving cars would probably just be returned to shareholders or invested in other tech companies if it weren't spent there.
The political element follows directly from that: if you aren't a car owner, but you are a bus and taxi user, you stop caring about parking and the specifics of your commute route. The robocar service will lobby the city for their own efficiency in your place - and what benefits their efficiency also benefits the users. So in one stroke you end up with an urban population that is aligned to empty out huge swathes of road space and garages for other uses such as bus lanes, bike parking, etc. People will feel safer on a bike because the cars will drive safely, and this is found in studies to be the main bottleneck to bicycle usage, so investment in dedicated bike infra could flatline in a self-driving environment, and bike usage will still rise!
It's hard to find an angle where there is truly a downside - the doomer response is kneejerk.
Unrealistic maybe, but it colors my interest or lack of interest in the middle of the road options.
Half paying attention systems strikes me as dangerous for people.
So, Waymo/Cruise (at this point in time) basically.
I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Stopping at a parking spot, push a button, and park my car for me, less useful but still worth it.
You already have all of this in a Volvo
Good news.
You're kind of joking, but this is more practical/safe than it sounds.
Most people drive to eat and drink out. You know how they all get home? By driving back. That's driving after drinking however many bottles of beer and glasses of wine. Every night they go out to eat and drink.
To put it simply, everyone breaks the law any time we feel like going out. The police everywhere know this, and the only reason they don't camp out at restaurants to arrest everyone is because they themselves are also guilty of the same.
Hyundai has a lane-keeping assist that centers your car in the lane. It is _very_ good, although of course I am nearly always ready to take over if needed.
IMO, smart cruise control + lane assist gets you a great deal of convenience for both day-to-day city traffic, and long-distance trips. The automation is good enough that it is helpful and makes driving much easier, but not so good that your mind switches completely off, so that you're always ready to take over if needed.
Any computerized system is only going to advance over time, with its theoretical limits far beyond the current state of the technology.
So full self-driving is clearly inevitable.
That is not true
Bus? Train?
Frankly? I want another 10-15 years of independence for my dad. His eyesight is failing due to a mix of wonky genetics, he's fine driving in daylight, but already has started being much more cautious driving around dusk.
I want an AR display that will highlight the road and objects in it. I was LiDAR sensors hitting the brakes if it detects catastrophe. I want the car to augment and extend his ability to use it.
That's the big sell of self driving cars. Not "push a button and be whisked away," but having your own abilities enhanced by machine input that would otherwise be inaccessible to you.
That currently seems the safer bet than hoping for AI driving/aids, but isn't an option in much of the USA.
However removing all the sensors, reducing redundancy, from a high speed moving car to save manufacturing costs and increase profits is in direct conflict with safe driving for the passenger and other people on the road.
Many more sensors, much more redundancy, roads that give feedback, networked cars that give feedback, satellites for near realtime external updates, all will make cars eventually drive themselves better than humans.
But certainly not "just cameras" that cannot even handle weather without severely compromised guessing. You don't do that in a physical world requiring safety.
And myself, by extension. We all have human moments.
Running red lights, mounting pavements to cut corners, brake-checking, dangerous overtaking, inadequate stopping distances, distractions, micro sleeps, accidently accelerating into shop fronts, and just generally phasing out because you are human.
I personally hate anti-social driving behaviour.
Brake Checking is the stupidest thing I have ever witnesses. It feels like it's becoming a trend here in Australia. Did it originate as aggressive behaviour in the US, or Russia maybe for insurance?
It's certainly a recent trend here in Australia.
I have noticed a lot of people failing to keep a safe distance from the car in front (tailgating), though, which is far stupider to me. Maybe the two are related?
Security, by not making human mistakes. But this won't happen for a long time and probably never with people like Musk leading the way.
Autonomous vehicles are a poor substitute for long-promised flying cars anyway.
What you really want is the TCO of a car in a helicopter.
This already exists, provided the route is extensively mapped beforehand, in two separate products (Cruise, Waymo)
Car drops me off in front of my destination, then goes off to a parking garage 15 minutes away and parks.
I want a car that will drive the hours of boring ride on the Autobahn. It should take over once I am on the Autobahn, then drive by itself while I am sleeping/working/playing, and then drive to a special "cool-down" parking lot, where it will take a few minutes mandatory break to make sure the driver has time to wake up. From there I will take over again.
I haven't driven a car for over ten years, and I don't miss a thing. No traffic misery. No parking misery. No government misery (tickets etc). No spending on never-ending this and that. No getting angry about roadworks or other people cutting me off and other nonsense.
It's absolute bliss.
I havetwo modes
1 home to beech with dog. Daily 10k total
2 town for supplies. Weekly 55k total
Not really suitable for taxies or Uber.
> I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Honda already does both of these, since 2020 at least iirc
I would say, drive me long distances on the high way. The rest (last mile, city country side) I can do myself. It also aligns with the fact that it is easier to make autonomous driving work for high ways than inside cities etc.
This would make taking an airplane less tempting and as my car can fit the whole family we do not need to fill up 4-5 seats in an airplane and we use much less CO2 per passenger.
Naturally I wand a car I can summon from the pub that will drive me the 20km, over country roads, to my house while I mix cocktails or have a nap.
That may never happen, current technology does not seem up to it.
Then what? Modern cruise control, that keeps my car a constant distance form the car in front (unless it roars off at a speed higher that what I am comfortable with) is great. Helpful, especially in city driving.
I would appreciate "automated rumble strips" that warns me gently if I veer out of my lane.
Stopping at a parking spot, push a button, and park my car for me, less useful but still worth it.
But unless I have L5, and can turn my back on the road as I drink my vodka drink, (would that be L6? The impossible dream....) I am not interested in anything that lets me take my hands off the when whilst driving on any road. It seems too dangerous.
As a computer programmer I make my living building complex machines, and I have a very deep distrust of machines built by my comrades, at Tesla or Mercedes.