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How Much Will Autonomous Cars Really Help? (theconversation.com)
An anonymous reader writes: An opinion piece at The Conversation questions the common belief that autonomous vehicles will easily solve a host of problems with road-based travel, including safety and traffic. "Assuming autonomous vehicles were one meter apart and traveling at 100 kilometers per hour (an aim that has been stated as the ultimate hope) this would mean around 25,000 people per hour could be taken down a freeway lane. While impressive, this movement capacity is only half that of a train. But getting to this capacity means 100% of vehicles are under control of a guidance system, with none under independent control. As soon as one car does this, the whole system would slow down considerably, as is seen on freeways now." The writer argues that a better role for autonomous cars might be to take passengers to and from hubs for public transportation.
We keep getting told driverless cars are crash-proof and theoretically perfect drivers or as close as you can possibly get to it but I'd say that's mostly hype. There will still be accidents, including fatal ones and I would think a worse, more catastrophic breed of accident will appear once they start having cars drive in very close formation.
Safety standards will slip, there will be more of a drive to improve fuel efficiency and more risks taken. Redundant systems will eventually be scrapped to save costs and we'll be back to (or worse) than we are now. Above all the fact remains that we live in an imperfect world where sh1t doesn't always go according to plan. Moose will still jump infront of robo cars and get killed, as will children - you just can't stop a lump of metal traveling at 100kph in 0 time using software alone (and even if you could, doing so would kill the occupants)
... is getting back from the pub after I've had a skinful.
With autonomous cars, the train actually has a chance of achieving it's 2x 1-lane capacity (noting that heavily traveled freeways are currently 2-4-lanes per direction of travel, though...) because people can take an autonomous car from their home to the train station, and then from the train station to their destination - the high cost of taxis rides isn't to support to the cost of the vehicle and its support, it's mostly supporting the cost to support the control system (a.k.a. the driver)
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I haven't read the TFA, but the summary is phenomenally stupid. Is 25,000 too few? Too many? I know, let's compare it to train that doesn't go from my driveway to my destination, and runs on its own schedule instead of mine.
And then change the subject again! Does this moron have any attention span?
While true enough autonomous cars to public transport makes a degree of sense, the author suffers from thinking most people are urbanites like them.
Unless you want the cost and upkeep of laying rail to the sticks, public transportation only works with a high enough degree of population density or in-between routes from major cities. Everyone else is left behemoth vehicles to carry supplies twice a month where public transport falls short. Not to mention you haven't solved congestion issues like the author suggests, but have merely moved them to different roads.
Nor have they considered that with sufficiently advanced autonomous vehicles, several people will probably forgo purchasing private vehicles altogether as taxi services drop in price and have the convenience of a private vehicle. That is less vehicles on the road, which helps in every measure.
By benefiting (mostly) rich white people instead of (mostly) poor minorities, it helps rake in campaign contributions from the Right People
Your entire post was hilarious; but I especially loved this bit. You've obviously never ridden on an urban mass transit system of any kind.
#DeleteChrome
I do not really believe that self driving cars will significantly reduce my transportation time. But I expect them to reduce the number of traffic accident. In a traffic jam, drivers can frustrated and bump in each other. I highly doubt self driving car would do that. Also, I do not care as much being in a traffic jam if I am not the one driving the car. Finally, if the car drive itself, then I can take more long distance trips easily: push the buttons, go to sleep, wake up in a different state.
This is the real reason I loved riding public transportation so much when I was living in France. It might not be the fastest way of moving around. But it was definitely the way that was consuming the less of my attention time. Made me arrived at work after 30 minutes of playing the nintendo DS. Much better than after 20 minutes of dealing with traffic congestion.
Precisely. We haven't figured out yet how to create 100% secure programs, and we already start using software in all places of life, including where people can get killed by malicious software. The damage hackers can cause increases with adoption of networked computers.
25,000 people per hour could be taken down a freeway lane. While impressive, this movement capacity is only half that of a train
The train comparison is completely fatuous since no train can carry 25,000 and the smaller ones don't run frequently enough to sustain that level of movement. Plus, last time I checked, I can't get a train from right outside my doorstep.
Trains have some uses, but they lack the versatility of cars, and far more expensive to build and operate and they are only comparably efficient when full or nearly so.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Where do you live that politicians like rail? My politicians love cars, and have been actively removing rail at every chance.
This suggests the most efficient use of the roadway is to get the vehicles as closely packed together as possible. Its an assumption many motorists seem to make while flow theory states otherwise.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
So called 'horseless carriages' will never catch on, not in the way that some dreamy-eyed automation lovers think it will.
At best they'll be a sophisticated high-end low-speed device for rich people. There will ALWAYS be the horse as the primary means of transportation. Operators of horseless carriages will always be required to be experts in the care, feeding, and handling of actual horses. You would never be able to put your kids in a car and send them to grandmother's house, so get over it.
You want to make horses safer? I recommend education, training and testing reforms. Stiffer penalties for people who are not good horse handlers, up to and including removing their riding privilege if they demonstrate they are not competent to ride a horse.
Too much technology will just make people lazy and less skilled. Even if there are completely 'autonomous' cars there will ALWAYS be circumstances where a human being must ride a horse, and what happens then? Distaster. Too many people seem to have no ability to consider 'what if', they think that since nothing bad has happened in the past, nothing bad can happen ever, so why worry about things you don't think will happen?
In conclusion, just get the whole idea of using a horseless carriage to zip along at high speed; it's not going to happen, ever, and for one simple immutable reason: Safety. Where human safety and lives are hanging in the balance, you cannot take half-measures and assume nothing bad will happen. Also, I hadn't even touched on the subject of malicious actors: What will you do when someone drives a horseless carriage into a crowd of people, or another horseless carriage, resulting in horrific firey death? Imagine the horror when you realize you cannot do anything to save yourself!
I suggest you all brush up on your riding skills, you're going to need them for the rest of your active life. I also suggest that if you just don't have the aptititude for horses, that you do the rest of us a favor, stop riding, and arrange for alternative transport for yourself; that alone would make the roads much safer than any amount of so-called 'horseless carriages' ever will.
Just to put that in perspective, that's almost 35 times what is currently possible (~700 cars per freeway lane at that speed), and about an order of magnitude more than even the average flow of traffic on heavily congested freeways.
Not really true. As soon as there are enough cars on the roads under autonomous control, we could pass laws requiring that all human-driven cars keep to the right. That would allow traffic to flow freely at speed in every lane Except for the one late that would be slow anyway because of people entering and exiting. So autonomous cars would still result in speeds that are dramatically better than freeways today.
Also, self-driving cars won't just impact freeway driving. City streets are an underutilized resource in most cities, for two reasons. First, drivers don't want to be bothered with having to watch for pedestrians and other vehicles cutting out in front of them. Second, traffic lights are timed to keep cars from driving too fast, because drivers aren't good at watching for pedestrians, other vehicles, etc. Given enough vehicles communicating with a central scheduler, traffic lights could become a thing of the past, and vehicles could plan their turns in such a way that most vehicles don't even have to slow down, much less stop. This will dramatically improve the average speed on city streets (even without increasing the speed limit). (Note that this will likely require normal cars to get a small, inexpensive add-on box installed that identifies the vehicle as a manual vehicle, and if that box ever stops working, the driver will have to stop at every traffic light—all-ways-red by default—until it gets fixed, but that's pretty trivial.)
Moreover, if more of these autonomous vehicles take city streets instead of hopping onto the freeway for two exits, you'll have lower contention for the entry/exit lane, which by itself will improve traffic flow on the freeways by almost as much as reducing the inter-car spacing does. And the reduced backup when getting off of the highway onto city streets (by allowing automated vehicles to not stop at the traffic lights at the top of the exit unless there are manually-operated vehicles present) will further reduce contention on the freeways.
Further, the assumption that trains carry more passengers is not necessarily correct, as it likely discounts periods in which the trains are not full, periods when the trains don't have enough capacity to meet demand, signal light malfunctions, suicidally depressed people jumping out onto the tracks in front of the trains, and all the other joys that plague train travel. Unlike autonomous cars, which can quickly divert to alternate routes to avoid accidents that block the road, when there's only one passenger track pair and somebody jumps out in front of the train, all trains on that route either single-track past the accident scene or worse, stop outright for hours, and there's no way for trains to route around an accident except by transferring everyone to a slow, cumbersome bus bridge. Throughput falls through the floor. This is a huge disadvantage.
A
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In densly populated areas mass transit is the right technology to transport people and goods. In future we will augment that with other short and mid range transport technologies, like bikes, e-bikes, low speed autonomous cabs etc.
You can speculate all you like about "a worse, more catastrophic breed of accidents", on average the amount of damage and loss of life and limb can only be expected to decrease sharply.
But yes, there will probably be accidents. It would be a bloody miracle if there weren't any. Actuator malfunctions, programming errors, hardware glitches, unanticipated situations. What have you. The uncomfortable truth is that you, as a passenger in an autonomous car, will be powerless to do much about it, if and when it happens.
I can sympathise: that doesn't feel good. But that's no reason not to adopt autonomous cars. We'll just have to deal with the remaining failures, absorb the loss, and improve the driver systems. It's better than having human drivers.
"movement capacity is only half that of a train"
Call me when the train can take the next left. Until then, trains can kind of go screw themselves for everything by dense urban people movement, in areas where you don't have to buy up insanely expensive real estate to lay down new tracks. This is not a socialist utopia, as in Sim City, where you can tear down a stadium because Skywatch One is reporting heavy traffic, in order to improve traffic flow.
The authors misunderstand the point of autonomous cars.
They won't be here for efficiency, safety or speed.
They will free up the time for the driver.
Instead of keeping my hands on the wheel, I can work, shave or have sex.
THIS will be the benefit.
It also means that the decision to drive or not to drive will be much cheaper. Today, a 30 minute drive will take 30 minutes off from my life. Tomorrow, it won't. I can still do what I want while being driven - which means that I will "drive" much more. The ones who can allow to own / rent robot cars will suddenly start moving around a lot more. This will create more traffic, maybe exponentially so. The green, eco-friendly vision of reduced traffic via autonomous vehicles is all wrong.
It will also affect urban planning in ways that nobody can yet comprehend nor predict.
Ride on one built in the last 20 years. Hint: it wasn't built for poor people.
I ride transit to work most days. It's pretty obvious you don't.
Seattle's light rail was built much more recently than that, and I've ridden it a fair bit. It runs through some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, and the ridership is very diverse - especially towards the middle of the day.
With any mode of mass transit, the diversity of its ridership obviously depends on the diversity of the areas it serves. I'm on a bus to the University of Washington most days - and those busses are crammed with college-age people of diverse races and nationalities. But when I'm downtown, the busses I've been on tend to have a lot of middle-aged white and Hispanic working-class riders.
#DeleteChrome
There are drawbacks of increased speed even if accidents can be cut to zero, such as increased gas usage. This can be solved by moving to electric vehicles, possibly running off power rails on the highways etc.
However, in urban areas speed is major factor for noise generation.
I personally live next to a major road where vehicles go past at 70+ km/h and the noise is very bothersome. It hovers around 60-65 dBA, peaks at at 75 when someone with a case of lead foot powers by. The majority of the noise is simply from the tires moving on the road surface and wind drag. You usually don't hear the engine unless it is a motorbike.
This is a small city and the road is a between a normal road and a highway, not that much traffic but very annoying. I have lived in larger cities, and despite more traffic around the clock it is less bothersome because the speed and hence noise is much lower. I actually have to wear headphones or ear plugs quite a lot because of it.
Current regulations in Sweden states that noise levels must not exceed 55 dBA at the outer wall of residential areas.
Reread the list, none of those things involve riding mass transit but rather building it.
The other thing that self driving vehicles will do is allow us to timeshift some of the traffic to when freeways aren't busy. E.g. freight can be moved to 10pm - 5am in urban areas, since we won't need to worry about the driver's exhaustion level. Fright would also be more efficient as driverless trucks don't need to take rest stops, and can be lighter because they don't require human amenities.
Also, if I had a driverless car, and a comfy seat, I'd not mind sleeping while my car drives me somewhere overnight and I could wake up wherever I needed to be in the morning.
I expect we'll see the first innovations in the transport industry.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
They'll help me reclaim the hours I spend every day in traffic. Safety and speed will be nice, but those won't be significant until most of the cars on the road are autonomous. Until then, I'll be more than happy with the extra time to sleep, read, write, watch TV, play games, and so on.
of the cars blows a tire, hits a deer or piece of trash that fell off a pickup, or has some other problem. Then you get a 50 car pileup, even with all of the cars operating under control of a single system. Traveling that close assumes that the cars all have similar braking characteristics, tires, engines, and suspension in good condition, etc. Look at cars going down the road today. Every 3rd or 4th car spews smoke, is rusty, and probably has other problems due to little to no maintenance.
The cars will need a grading system based on design, performance, and maintenance history before being allowed to join such a "train".
By benefiting (mostly) rich white people instead of (mostly) poor minorities, it helps rake in campaign contributions from the Right People
Your entire post was hilarious; but I especially loved this bit. You've obviously never ridden on an urban mass transit system of any kind.
Nice way to except a quotation from GP without context and earn yourself some karma.
But while GP's post was over-the-top, his general point that buses are more important to the urban poor and subways tend to be built without the poor in mind is largely accurate. If you don't believe me, you might start with some articles like this and this, or maybe this recent survey of public transport riders in NYC, which showed the median income was significantly lower for those who used the bus as well as the subway, and even lower for those who used the bus alone.
Basically, for most big cities in the U.S. it works like this:
- Rich people have their own drivers.
- Upper middle class people who live in the suburbs drive themselves. If they live in the city, they take taxis.
- Most middle class people who live in the city take the subway. If they live in the suburbs, they drive to a commuter rail and take that.
- Poor people can't afford cars. They can't live in the suburbs, and if they do, they usually can't afford to live in the ones with convenient commuter rail service. If they live in the city, they often can't afford to live in the more popular areas right next to subway lines. (Those that can often live in rent-control neighborhoods which prevent the convenient subway-adjacent areas from being overrun by young professionals with more money.) The poor disproportionately live in the areas of the city that aren't served by subways, so they end up taking buses (because they can't afford cars) or doing a hybrid commute by bus until they can get to a subway line.
It's clear from this post and another reply that you don't understand the reality of where subway/rail lines get constructed. They are VERY expensive, and poor areas tend not to have the tax revenue to justify them. So, poor areas get the much cheaper buses.
You see a lot of poor people riding subways and light rail in the city for two reasons: (1) the subways run through the most popular business districts in major cities, so even if a poor person starts on a bus, they likely find a connection to a subway convenient to get to work, and (2) dense urban areas tend to have a lot of poor areas located between middle-class and richer areas. So when a subway/rail is built to connect the middle-class areas, it will likely end up running through poor areas anyway.
If you look at most major cities in the Northeast U.S. which have had subways for many years, you'll likely find plenty of examples of poor areas that have been promised a subway/rail line for decades. But they rarely get built. It's much easier and cheaper to extend a new commuter rail line to another suburb, and it's more lucrative to get middle-class riders who can pay premium fares. Expanding the inner-city subway system often requires expensive and complex digging through dense areas, and for what? To get the relatively low fares that the city mostly gets from poor people on buses or taking subway connections from buses anyway.
It's lovely that you see some minorities in your subway commute, but GP had a legitimate point about the expense of rail vs. buses and where the former gets prioritized. The poor generally end up taking the bus in most cities.
Where do you live that politicians like rail? My politicians love cars, and have been actively removing rail at every chance.
Same where I am (in the UK). Mrs Thatcher set the tone - only known to have travelled on a train once in her adult life and that was for a ceremony.
Conservatives hate railways because they think they are nests of trade unionism.
Liberals hate railways because they are essentially run in authoritarian ways.
Socialists hate railways because they think they are transport for rich people (This is the UK remember).
most of them won't understand that asphalt is cheaper and is used more effectively than rails.
It is not cheaper, it is just funded in a different way. Rails have to be funded by the railway company. In the UK at least roads are funded by public money and it is lost in the noise of it. Effectively private motorists subsidise things like buses and trucks, massively. I pay the equivalent of about $1 per 5 miles in my car tax, and more in the fuel tax.
What is expensive about rail is the insane set of rules and regulations about safety and finance - which, unlike on the road, are strictly observed. To spend $x on a railway project (like lengthening a platform to enable longer trains to use it) you will need to spend $5x on a safety case and $5x on a financial case. I have seen it at close hand.
And how many one lane freeways are there? Typical three lane freeways have more capacity at much lower cost.
Relying on a normal human as backup for the computer is a complete non-starter. Read up on what happened when google started letting employees use the Beta cars instead of the pro drivers. Even though they were informed they may need to take over, and even though they knew this was an experimental car the employees took names, whipped out laptops, etc. They were in no shape to takeover.
Normal mouth breathers will be even worse.
Now consider a car owner who has not driven a mile in the last couple years plinking away on his laptop when suddenly the car beeps and he is supposed to take over. He will be disoriented for a while under ideal circumstances, but odds are something really weird happened for HAL to throw in the towel. Is a Cessna landing? Emergency vehicle? Bug splat on the Lidar? Low tire pressure outside the underwriters criteria? The driver has been setup for failure, which cannot be acceptable.
HAL has to be 100% or merely augmenting like adaptive cruise control. A 99% solution is a nightmare scenario (unless you are a lawyer).
True. In a bad traffic jam, how would frustrated people who have nothing to do at all but look out the windows react? Let's hoe we don't find out, because 88% of those people have guns.
Most people look at the fairly obvious cost savings that autonomous cars will provide but miss the less obvious ones.
For instance in many cities there is little competition among grocery stores because a few early movers grabbed up crap land where they could then afford to put up a huge store with a massive parking lot. Then the city either grew to surround their store, or the value in that section of the city went way up. Thus the barrier to entry is impossibly high. The only grocery store competition that I see in the cities that I have lived in happens at the edge of town where there is crap land still available. But with autonomous cars the advantage of having a massive parkinglot plummets so we will end up with far greater grocery competition. This may also be coupled with autonomous grocery delivery which will also drive up the levels of competition.
Then there will be the massive reduction in the amount of wasted safety crap that we haul around and pay for in a modern driven car. Thus, on roads with 100% autonomous cars we can opt for basically the minimum amount of car that keeps us off the road and keeps the weather out. Not only will this be a minimal car but due to the fact that it drives itself and does not need to "handle" well, it means that far less engineering will need to go into the manufacture of a personal vehicle. This then opens up the field of making cars to all kinds of interesting and new competitors.
Then there is the cost of all the traffic violations going away. Over the years this can either add up directly by incurring them or as a driver with no moving violations and few parking tickets I can say that I have spent way too much effort avoiding these. I have no idea how much I can value the knowledge that some predatory taxman(ticket issuing authority) isn't waiting to jump out and rape my wallet; but peace of mind must be worth something.
Then there are the wasted hours trying to find parking, the predatory costs of parking in many cities, the predatory pricing of most cab companies, the predatory pricing of car rentals, the predatory pricing of auto-body shops. All of those pretty much vanish or become wildly more competitive. For instance if I do own my own car and I want to let it go park itself then I don't really care where it parks. So if the convenient parking garage wants $20 an hour, it can be worth it for my car to drive anything up to $9.99 away for free parking or some variation thereof to find a combination of parking that saves me money. Or if my car is less than $20 per hour to run then I could just let it drive around on its own.
Then there isn't just the car sharing that everyone talks about but within a family car sharing. This sort of car sharing would not only be for the typical family of 2.5 kids but could easily be among larger family or friend groupings. I see no reason that many (not all though) of my family would be welcome to my car. Especially if some kind of service would then effectively bill them for their share. This would be most excellent when one or more people in a family group have a speciality vehicle such as a picktup truck. I could see a nice app where you select your "reserved" hours and then let other family members largely have at it. Again, ideally this would end up being like some kind of bill splitting app where they would get automatically dinged a usage fee. I don't want to share my personally owned car with strangers, but family and friends would be OK. Some people argue that the personal car will go away. I strongly disagree for commuters as the peak loading would then leave the "shared" cars as non-performing assets. Some car pooling and whatnot will somewhat eat up commuting but I don't want to be with a bunch of people every morning. I want some "me" time so even if I commuted I would still own a tiny little pod car.
So those are only a few of the strange cost savings that the average person would have as there are many hidden costs to owning a car. I suspect that as the situation e
Driverless cars aren't about traveling at high speeds, packed together like sardines. Commercial aircraft fly themselves these days, but traffic controllers still keep them 3 miles apart. Such close formations of driverless cars would still result in massive pileups when one of the cars malfunctions and crashes.
The point of driverless cars is to let me do something else while I'm traveling. I won't care so much about my one-hour commute if I can read the news or get started on my work day while I'm on the way. I'll also be less stressed. An then there is long-distance car trips, which will be far more pleasant when it is no longer necessary to watch the road.
When driverless cars are a reality, I'm in!
Precisely. We haven't figured out yet how to create 100% secure programs, and we already start using software in all places of life, including where people can get killed by malicious software. The damage hackers can cause increases with adoption of networked computers.
Yet you don't get anywhere with the zealots. They have this vision where thousands of cars are happily zipping a long a few feet form each other all in perfect harmony. It's like those old early 20th century future prediction artworks.
Because there is so much more than just 1 car and it's autonomous control - and vulnerability. This is the Grand Big Kahuna of the internet of things.
So if you take a car that needs to switch lanes to exit in the world of full lanes bumper to bumper autonomous driving world, the bumper to bumper cars ahead and behind and in other lanes will need to know this, and allow the car to switch lanes. Dammit, this is not even remotely trivial.
And since this will have to be done via RF , there are some nasty criminal vectors as well:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://965kvki.com/watch-cell-...
Now imagine some crazy shit pulling that stunt.
While it's likely that this in itself wouldn't cause accidents, it would keep cars that might want to turn, switch lanes, or merge form doing that, and mamma, we have a bit of a mess and severe traffic slowdowns.
And then we get to the Internet of Things part. I suppose that's perfectly safe.
Even with all that, It might be possible to end up with a good system. But not right now.
Perhaps we should just get the assist systems ironed out first. Just that will significantly cut down on accidents - lane assist and adaptive cruise control with anti-tailgating radar and anti collision braking. And doesn't have to employ the IoT at all.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
25,000 people. Not 25,000 cars. They seem to be assuming 5 people per car, so that's 7 times current capacity.
I don't know where they get their 50,000 people per hour on heavy rail though.
Instead of keeping my hands on the wheel, I can work, shave or have sex.
This is Slashdot.
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TFA appears to be some kind of FUD. No one has any doubt that Autonomous Vehicles will do better than people. With thirty thousand dead every year in the US it is arguable that trained chimps could do better than people.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
" also choose my own level of risk tolerance." No asshole, among a fleet of autonomous car, you chose the risk other people shall endure for your privilege. So the occasional death and handicap for life is also the price we have to pay for your freedom ? Sure. Ok. But from now onward 1) fine should be multiplied by 100, with penal consequence if you are unable to pay. Speed ? 20000 dollar. 2) you shall have a much greater insurance premium than us, since you are intentionally taking risk. Let us say 10 to 50 time what you pay now. 3) you will have to pass your driving license every year on your cost, to prove you can drive among autonomous car.
Go ahead continue with your privilege, but be prepared to pay a HEFTY sum for that privilege. Because we the others, can't waitz for the driver on the road to not be human assholes anymore.
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What does 1m distance between cars matter? It's the throughput that matters, that is, how long it takes a car to travel a distance. That changes little whether the distance between cars is 1m or 100m. Cars will naturally keep a larger distance than 1m, because that would allow navigating (in particular, cars getting in from a side road).
Anyway, the measure (how many people in vehicles can stand on a piece of road) is pointless, and since the article is based on it, the article is pointless.
Exactly this, the cars will only be able to slow down as quickly as the car in the car-train with the slowest brakes, if the slowest car can't slow down fast enough to avoid the accident then it hits all of the cars in front of it*.
If the accident involves a car forcefully being stopped at quicker than the braking speed of the cars in the car train then a lot of autonomous cars (30+ or even 90+ for more lanes) will end up in a pile-up*.... Instead of 1 to 2 cars if they are leaving a 2-second gap.
*if the vehicles are leaving a 1m gap
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Two points: one significant and one sorta silly.
Once autonomous cars are safer than human drivers, then no insurance company will sell auto insurance to an individual. Why would they? Any collision between an autonomous car and one driven by a meat monkey will always be judged the fault of the human driver. The companies operating the autonomous vehicles will have far too much at stake to permit any other result ... and their lawyers will be better.
Autonomous cars will be God's gift to suicide bombers because He wants them to live and bomb another day. No way autonomous cars will be allowed anywhere near important places like a courthouse or crowded places like a train station. You will have to walk the last kilometer or use your hoverboard.
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The auto industry itself could very well lose as you point out. Service and repair is a huge money maker for them. They could be behind the FUD. But then why tout public transport? They have lobbied against it for years. Bit of a mystery as to who gains from this particular narrative.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
The public transportation proponents are attempting to solve the wrong problem.
We are not all going to and from work all the time. Often, we're living in DC and we're packing the kids into the car and the luggage and maybe a set of tools into the trunk and going to Grandma's in South Carolina to visit and fix up a few things around her house over the weekend.
Now describe to me how a train is going to help with the 3 suitcases and the portable air compressor and paint gun with 5 quarts of satin white? Gonna lug that onto a train? No, you're not, you're going to be sitting in traffic with everyone else, especially on Sunday night when I-95 thru the Fredericksburg, Va. area comes to a near-halt with all the traffic (those people aren't going to work or coming from it, either) and the Harry W. Nice bridge on US 301 between Virginia and Maryland over the Potomac is backed up 5 miles with the very same sort of traffic for points north.
That's the problem to solve. Not everyone is moving around to go to work. Some are working on Grandma's house, others have 300 lbs of scuba gear / tanks / etc. or maybe a ski-doo or maybe all of the above. We need to stop the knee-jerk to "public transportation" because it just doesn't work all the places that cars and trucks work. Build some more roads, damnit, and yeah, lets robotize the cars. We want to go to sleep in the back seat and truck bed, so when we get to Grandma's, we're ready to attack the painting, or ready to hit the beach with the ski-doo...
The main area where self driving cars will prove useful is when I get where I'm going the car can then go and find it's own damned parking spot!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
We've already done that, by putting software into avionics and medical systems and the like. Worse, the medical software is often running on obsolete operating systems that are connected to the Internet. So far, it seems to work.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If the car is driving, I'll have situational awareness only some of the time, even if I'm not doing something else. Humans don't do that well. If I have to maintain situational awareness all the time, I have to be driving. I'd be fine with some software assistance, but if the car is going to be driving autonomously it can't rely on me to do anything useful without at least a second's warning.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Autonomous vehicles will do a great job... If your goal is to limit the overpopulation!
If you think they will be safer than people, then you are being superstitious. And I speak as an Engineer working with automated equipment.
"If Engineers built buildings the way Programmers write programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization!"
In rural areas, the poor people are the ones with four vehicles parked on the lawn.
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Public transport systems (rail) in the US failed economically, especially when they were regulated into unprofitability and seized by the government (NYC, for example). Big cities retained their systems when more or less appropriate, but small city light rail systems were absurd and couldn't even compete with buses.
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Of course they run through the poor neighborhoods. That's the point- protect the bourgeoisie from the poors. But I bet there aren't many stops in those neighborhoods.
Off the top of my head:
Since the cars are already communicating with each other, they can space themselves at a distance appropriate to the capabilities of each car, or less optimally at the distance appropriate for the worst car. Each car should already be tracking its current capabilities, else it's not safe to begin with.
We're not expecting immediate perfection, just vast improvement. Perfection can be approached asymptotically.
It's going to be interesting watching the changes in my next 50 years, having been astounded by the changes in my first (almost) 50.
WALSTIB!