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Elon Musk Plans To Solve Traffic Congestion With Self-Driving Buses (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk believes self-driving buses are the answer to solving traffic congestion and mass transit in densely populated cities. Musk has teased the idea while at a transportation conference in Norway, according to Bloomberg. "We have an idea for something which is not exactly a bus but would solve the density problem for inner city situations." he said. "Autonomous vehicles are key... I don't want to talk too much about it. I have to be careful what I say." Elon Musk released the Model X last year with semi-autonomous Autopilot mode, and most recently, announced the "budget-friendly" Model 3 with similar autonomous functionality. There's no question autonomous vehicles are the future. "I very much agree with solving the high-density transport problem," Musk said in Norway. "There's a new type of car or vehicle that would be great for that and that'll actually take people to their final destination and not just the bus stop." The Hyperloop is another example of Elon's vision to revolutionize transportation.
Solving traffic congestion with self-driving buses that poor and middle class people need to ride on is a bit presumptive
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The very definition of an inventor.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm no big fan of all the "self driven" bullshit being heaped upon us lately but I don't see how the "AI" on these buses could be any less skilled than your typical Denver bus driver...
There is nothing in the article that even points us in the direction of a bus other than "Something not really like a bus". In fact there is nothing in this article that points us at anything
I think he is brainstorming a driverless limo/bus. Without the driver station it could be square to shorten the vehicle. Then separate the vehicle into compartments with say 3 or 4 sections. You can book a whole section for yourself or share. Just imagine a squarish vehicle with 4 sets of gull wing doors.
They don't want to talk about it since it's likely they would be for uber, lift and conventional taxi businesses.
Don't forget once we have driverless the local taxi medallion companies can get in on the game quite easily too.
More like a self-driving taxi, I'd imagine. A self-driving bus doesn't have any substantial advantages over regular buses, but a self-driving taxi... might be slightly cheaper. Slightly. It's revolutionary!
I'm puzzled. When referring to "rich people", are you talking about rich individuals (which aren't going to buy buses for themselves), or first world nations (which are already buying expensive and comfortable buses from bus manufacturers)? OK, forget that, you'd be wrong either way.
Ezekiel 23:20
Back in the day, every once in a while someone would propose some "this will solve everything" solution to the problem of spam, and we'd reply with the list of many reasons why it wouldn't work. I feel like we need to update the meme below for all of the technocratic solutions coming out of Silicon Valley nowadays by people who don't particularly live in the real world, and/or are millennials.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
More like a self-driving taxi, I'd imagine. A self-driving bus doesn't have any substantial advantages over regular buses, but a self-driving taxi... might be slightly cheaper. Slightly. It's revolutionary!
Like Uber are working on after hiring a large portion of Carnegie Mellon's robotics department?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09...
How is this different from buses with drivers? That hasn't solved the problem. (Not sure there really is a problem)
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
eh, self driving bus in inner city sounds very doable and safer for the present compared to autonomous car that has to deal with different environments and high speeds. the tech is already here and sufficient for it
Indeed, small buses, especially if benefiting from the drastically lower maintenance of electric drive, and possibly organized more like a taxi-sharing service. Even just having smaller buses running much more frequently would make busses far more attractive.
Of course the bus driver also sort of doubles as a sort of low-impact security guard, but I could easily see fleets of minibuses in say, Denver, being attended by minimum-wage stoners encouraging people to "just chill out" and doing a little cleanup throughout the day. It'd probably be a heck of a lot more pleasant. Heck, you could probably even get lots of people willing to work as part time attendants in exchange for a free bus pass, and reduce the actual cost to near zero.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
electric trains that get you within four blocks are great, I use 'em every work day
Drivers represent something like 80% of the vehicle costs, yes. A diesel powered bus costs about $300,000 as a one time cost + maintenance and last 10 years. and in major US cities a bus driver costs about $60,000-90,0000 per year, plus another $25,000/yr in health costs, retirement costs and administrative costs.
You can buy one additional bus for every three years of employing a bus driver.
And since you don't have to deal with humans, you can run the buses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at the same frequency that you normally do during rush hour. Which means there's a bus coming by your house every 15 minutes, every day, forever. In my city you can get a bus every 15 minutes from 7am-4:45pm, but then goes to once every 2 hours, which makes it really hard to utilize public transit after work.
moox. for a new generation.
So , the Tesla electric cars don't count?
Or, the SpaceX launches of satellites and space station resupply?
Or, millions of solar panels?
What have you done... Ever.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
There are a lot of other costs. Cleaning crews, maintenance crews, stations, graffiti, etc.
Realistically this won't solve anything, the issue isn't the driver, its the other people on the bus (which would be worse without someone in charge) and its far less convenient than your own car which takes you directly from A to B more quickly. As someone who doesn't own a car (by choice), by the time I walk to a bus stop I could have driven to most of my destinations.
Yes, it's called a "train".
There have been self-driving mass-transit vehicles in service for a decade.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What are we going to do with the massive unemployment the horseless carriages will cause? the breeders, the whip makers, the blacksmiths, the hay balers, the veterinarians, the reinmakers, the shit shovelers.....what will we do when the market can't absorb those jobs as mechanical devices have entered there too?
Trolleys, my friend. They're buses before Rockefeller and GM convinced cities to give up their electric fleets for polluting vehicles.
http://www.gutenberg.us/articl...
You are welcome on my lawn.
The driver culture considers owning one's own car as a crucial element in their self-image of freedom. Historically, they have voted for transit systems only when they think buses and trains will take enough loser-cruiser-users off the road to lessen the traffic around their treasured freedom chariots.
But if ridesharing services and autonomous cars proliferate, a large number of new users will unwittingly move over from the driver culture to the rider culture. If you get used to Ubering and riding autonomous cars in the city, even you hold on to a weekend land yacht of your own, you will now be a lot friendlier to the idea of riding a multipassdenger transit vehicle when this will save money than you ever were before.
The shift to automobiles did not reduce the requirement for jobs as AI will. The automobile did not replace people, AI replaces people.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Yeah, if only he was in the position to be able to make this technology that doesn't exist...
Now imagine being the human driver who needs to merge into that lane.
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If Elon Musk wants to invent something that will improve mass transit, how about a mind control device that will make people actually want to use public transit in the first place? All a 'self-driving bus' will do is make bus drivers less skilled -- because they'll still have to sit there, supervising some shitty pseudo-AI that is pseudo-driving a 9 ton chunk of metal and flesh on wheels that could kill dozens of people if it fucks up -- and make no mistake, it will be required to still have manual controls and a qualified human operator, alert and supervising it, at all times. Stupid idea.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
What's he going to do about the mass unemployment he will create?
People don't live to work, people have to work to live. At least until work is no longer required. Then we'll need a new system of distribution. One that does not couple work output to income. Because soon enough work will be the scarce resource.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Paypal isn't profitable?
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Those train things require rails which is expensive and limiting compared to the autonomous vehicles being developed use existing roadways. Adapting routes due to construction or unexpected traffic jams isn't really an option with trains.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
No, you need to get cargo off the highways and onto trains which are much more fuel efficient. Forget the Hyperloop for people. Make it for cargo and get the trucks off the highways. I was leaving Toronto late one night and it was mostly transports. And a lot of those trucks are all heading to the same place. Use shipping containers, put them on trains, and then use trucks to do short haul for the last leg. Then by getting the trucks off of the highways we make them safer and we don't have to keep expanding them.
The issue with trains is that you've got fixed routes and stops with very little scope to modify these. I've just started a new job that's virtually on top of a train station in greater london. Even though I live within 15 minutes of two stations on different lines and 30 minutes on another line, all of which go into London, it is considerably faster for me to drive for 90 minutes each way than get the train because none of those lines are the one that goes where my work it.
My wife was looking at a role in Tooting (another area in London) near a station and you'd think by the number of train and underground lines, combined with the amount of London traffic it'd be a no brainer to use public transport... wrong, the need for three changes means it's much quicker to drive or even bike. Start looking at somewhere that doesn't have hundreds of stations and it becomes even less likely that rail transport is the way forward.
Now if someone offered a automated bus that took ~15 mins longer to get from near my house to the office and cost ~£30 a day (my effective car cost) I'd be all over that.
Thats funny because in the states we absolutely fund busses with public money. You still pay for public transit but it is subsidized. You guys don't have public busses at all? Just private ones?
We have private bus lines too but they are generally inter-city buses.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Bull. Everybody and their dog has "planned" autonomous cars and hyperloops, but that doesn't make them inventors. Musk is only different because he has the cash to execute the plans.
Just think of what could be accomplished if we didn't limit innovation to people who won the Paypal lottery...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I suspect you are ignoring the mining, energy resources, refining of various materials, science and engineering, manufacturing, distribution, sales and marketing