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Will Self-Driving Cars Clog Our Highways? (go.com)
An anonymous reader writes: While self-driving cars may be safer and cheaper, the Associated Press warns they could also create massive traffic congestion. "The problem, say transportation researchers, is that people will use them too much." One auto industry expert predicts that self-driving cars will increase travel by those over 65, as well as those between 16 and 24, resulting in at least 2 trillion extra miles being driven each year. In addition, "Airlines also may face new competition as people choose to travel by car at speeds well over 100 mph between cities a few hundred miles apart instead of flying," and faster commute times could mean more urban sprawl as workers may spread into cheaper neighborhoods that are further from the city center.
The taxi / mini bus idea will also do the same with a high number of them needing to go and force from some depot before / after rush hour.
Is it a surprise that when you invent a good thing, people will want to use it? You might as well say that if you invent smart phones, then cell networks will be hopelessly congested. Of course they will, which will create pressures to build out new networks.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
With the advent of self-driving vehicles, we also are embracing enhanced congestion avoidance. When we worry about an extra volume of vehicles on the roadways we must also take into account advanced congestion avoidance routing helping to mitigate that impact. I'm not suggesting that it's a non-issue, but we may not know the true effect for now. The real problems would come from inaccurate road mapping data causing poor route planning. Also, nobody looks forward to their suburb turned into a secondary thoroughfare that suddenly all the non-residents would use.
this new technology opens doors for me.
They drive themselves, but I think you still have to open the door yourself.
Lazy bastard.
Oh wait... not weeping... the other thing.
Over the last couple of decades the airline industry has been going well out of their way to make sure that flying is unpleasant an experience as possible. Granted, they've had no small amount of cooperation from the government. But I've not a doubt in the world that some properly-directed lobbying and cries of "impacting the bottom line" would have returned the TSA thugs to their former jobs delivering pizza and greeting people at walmart ten or more years ago, if the airlines weren't complicit. And even aside from the TSA goons, they've reduced seat pitch, cut amenities, overbooked flights, run flights behind schedule or cancelled them,, eliminated meal services, and started nickel-and-diming with every sort of added fee imaginable, all 100% on their own initiative.
I've no bloody sympathy for them at all. A pox upon their houses.
Imagine all the people...
Hello, electronic computers already made us bad at math. There used to be lots of people who made their livings by adding columns of numbers, doing multiplication and division and logarithms! Now those things are done by people only as curiosities, and basically nobody could make a living doing them. QED, or GED, or whatever.
Not only that, but autonomous vehicles could tell in advance which routes they would be using in the next few hours, so that large-scale traffic could adapt and no congestion would ever arise.
Ezekiel 23:20
Door to door time betwen Dallas and Houston favors a car. But the time and concentration excludes a car. You can fly up in the morning, taxi to the office, and taxi to the airport and fly home in the same time as driving, but you have to pay attention to the car the whole time driving..
Commute times will drop significantly when there are self-driving-only lanes, and the makers come up with a single protocol for communication, so they operate more like an indefinite length train than a line of cars.
Learn to love Alaska
Electric self-driving cars, along with the ability to pool rides by picking up others who are along the way, will cut down on noise, pollution, and road congestion. When cities are buying electric buses because they are cost-effective, the age of oil is coming to an end. And they'll be even more cost-effective when they don't need a driver, so you can either deploy more or make the rides cheaper, or optimize for both.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
3. In addition, "Airlines also may face new competition as people choose to travel by car at speeds well over 100 mph between cities a few hundred miles apart instead of flying," and faster commute times could mean more urban sprawl as workers may spread into cheaper neighborhoods that are further from the city center.
A: same as number 2, just because you have a self-driving car won't make it magically cheaper to drive somewhere. And unless we change laws, nobody's going to be legally driving at 100 mph between cities any time soon. Not with the "quality" of our current highways.
Yes, this one is definitely strange. I can already go to a city 8 hours away very cheaply if I'm willing to ride a bus. The one advantage that I see of a self-driving car would actually not affect congestion. With a self-driving "sleeper" car, I could get in at bedtime and wake up at my destination. This is currently low traffic time. Now self-driving cars are going to drastically change things but if people are smart about it, it might actually reduce traffic. For instance, my groceries could be delivered after rush hour is over or if it was a "refrigerated" car, it could deliver them in the middle of the night while I'm asleep. Congestion tends to work itself out but self-driving cars, drones, pods, etc... will drastically change everything even making specialized robots like a "toilet cleaning robot" that deliver themself more practical.
My home town still doesn't have a commercial airline.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Wouldn't the self driving cars be engineered in a way that it can sense a clog forming and be able to re-route traffic around a clog, and mitigate congestion?
Eventually oil will start running out, sometime in the next few years...
That's what they said in the 70's.
In 1920 it was predicted that the world had enough oil to last 20 years. And that same prediction was made in 1940 and 1960.
The curating around here is a f*cking joke.
My favourite website for many, many years appears to have truly died.
'auto industry expert' Yeah, I trust that guy. I'm sure he isn't biased at all. The premise is so farcical I actually laughed out loud when I saw the headline.
Anybody know where intelligent discussions of modern science and technology happen these days? It sure ain't here.
> 1. While self-driving cars may be safer and cheaper
> A: Self-driving cars are nowhere near cheaper at the moment.
If self-driving cars are really as much safer as Google's data and claims indicate, they will very quickly become cheaper to own and operate, even if the initial purchase price is slightly higher.
Think actuarial tables. Every self-driving car is loaded with sensors and data recorders. All of this data will eventually get into the hands of the insurance companies. And if Google's claims on self-driving cars prove to be true (And have we been given reason to believe otherwise?), the actuaries will update their tables, and premiums for manual-driving cars will skyrocket.
If you're an enthusiast, you'll probably still be able to take your Miata out on weekends. Just keep the annual milage below 5000. But everyday commuting? Going out for a night on the town? It'll be significantly cheaper to use self-drivers.
Imagine all the people...
It won't be long before there will be ultra-high speed highways that are for automated cars only. Remember, with automated cars, traffic could theoretically look like a traffic jam in a snapshot but actually be moving at 100+ mph. A self driving car doesn't need 100+ ft between it and the car in front of it to account for reaction time.
Pick up others along the way? You mean they way everyone does with taxis today? Sure.
More miles driven/ridden? Sure. However, those miles done by the 65+ crowd is probably not going to be during rush hour. Also, a lot of the longer trips are going to be done at night. Personally I'm looking forward to getting into the car in the evening, going to sleep and waking up at my vacation destination in the morning. As others have mentioned, self-driving only lanes will take care of most of the problem. That lane will be whipping along at 90+ with inches between each car.
My home town still doesn't have a commercial airline.
That's because your hometown sucks.
All those loud and smelly horseless carriages are a menace and they scare the horses!
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
self-driving cars wouldn't drive like the idiots who are causing the congestion right now.
This! There will be plenty of room on the roads for the additional vehicles. Also, things will be safer as there will be fewer teenagers actually driving and elderly people get some of their mobility back. It's all win.
Maybe an AI driving a car won’t be as good as some of the best drivers, but they’ll certainly be better than average. The main advantage is that they can take into account traffic factors that human drivers won’t be aware of, so they can optimize travel. There will be fewer accidents, and traffic will move more smoothly. At safer and more consistent speeds, people will get to their destinations sooner, and they’ll use less energy to do it.
Seriously, the costs of driving / mile will return to what we had back in the 60s, which was very low. What is needed now, is to raise taxes on gas/diesel slowly and invest into the infrastructure so that in the future, things will be safer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Just wait until they invent the self-driving mobility scooter. You're gonna want to stay out of the Wal-mart.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Try these:
While microwaves may be safer and cheaper than regular ovens, the alarmist press warns they could also create obesity "The problem, say kitchen appliance researchers, is that people will use them too much."
While computers may be safer and cheaper, the alarmist press warns they could also create over-forestation by replacing paper records "The problem, say accounting researchers, is that people will use them too much."
While televisions may be safer and cheaper than traveling to the theater, the alarmist press warns they could also create widespread job loss among stage actors "The problem, say media researchers, is that people will use them too much."
While wooden tables may be safer and cheaper, the alarmist press warns they could also create more expensive wood "The problem, say carpentry researchers, is that people will use them too much."
While cotton mills may be safer and cheaper, the alarmist press warns they could also create unemployment "The problem, say union researchers, is that people will use them too much."
Are there any random products you couldn't fill into this sentence? Very meaningful speculation... why, it's almost Luddite....
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
With self-driving cars that data will instead go directly to Google, marketers and the US government.
You are welcome on my lawn.
These people aren't thinking big picture. Forget a fleet of self owned self-driving cars. Yes, self-car ownership is a staple of American life right now, but it's death knell has been sounded.
Imagine a fleet of hundreds of self driving buses, vans, et cetera. Now cross that with Uber -- request a ride, and you get put on a list of stops where the bus is going to go. Picture having to wait no more than 15 minutes for a self-driving public transportation vehicle to take you anywhere in your city, with algorithms picking the most efficient route to get who needs a ride, when they need it. Who is going to buy their own car when you can just get a public transportation pass and go anywhere?
Hell, what government is going to allow people to drive their own cars when self-driving vehicles can drive for them? And when even self-driving self-owned cars turn out to be a detriment to the self-driving public transportation, welp...
We don't consider horses when designing modern roadways, outside of some very specific scenarios. We're entering an era where considering manually driven cars are going to become a similar relic of the past.
Assuming only the known reserves and motor inefficiencies, yes the would have run out. Thanks to new discoveries of oil deposits and improved motors, it became less a problem.
That would a VERY good thing - those bastards have managed to turn an experience, which was never all that brilliant, into a bloody nightmare. I have cut down my air traveling dramatically, but I still have to suffer the ignominy of travelling by air for intercontinental trips.
EVs, because of Tesla, are happening much faster. As such, these other car makers are being forced to also go down the paths of EVs as well as automated cars, all because of Musk.
And the costs / mile will be quite cheap.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And suppose you use your "self driving car" just to make little trips back and forth to friend like we "text" right now? Send the car with a small package, send the car with a joke, send the car... For anything?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Sure, at first. That's why I said "eventually". But do you really think the insurance companies *won't* get access? Already, some will give you a discount on your premiums if you plug a little widget which they supply into your OBD2 port, which sends your car's data back to them. There's even a "per mile" insurance company that uses that same data to charge you for only your true milage, not the guesstimate you make for a year when you first buy the policy. Self-driving data is probably too complex to pull from that port. But if it's not mandated yet, soon enough there will be a law requiring it to be accessible to the car's owner and third-party mechanics... the very reason for the OBD standard in the first place. For that matter, you know Google does in fact allow you to download the data they have on you, right?
And once the data is accessible to the owners, all it will take is a discount to get not a few of them to pass it along to their insurers. And that's how the ball starts rolling.
Imagine all the people...
By platooning, SDCs can drive much closer together than HDCs, and they also help to smooth out the "accordion effect" in stop-and-go traffic. It is unlikely that they will increase congestion. It is far more likely that they will help relieve congestion.
Large fixed-route public buses will be replaced by small self-driving vans, with flexible on-demand routing. As public transit becomes faster and more convenient, more people will use it, reducing congestion even more.
Not only that, but autonomous vehicles could tell in advance which routes they would be using in the next few hours, so that large-scale traffic could adapt and no congestion would ever arise.
Only if it knows in advance where it's going, I'm not going to schedule when I leave for work or whether I stop for groceries on the way home or not. I guess other types of autonomous cars might, but they usually try to avoid rush hour anyway.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Parking is the biggest issue. When you go downtown, you can't find a parking spot. But that's not an issue with self driving cars, you just tell it to circle the block at low speed for 4 hours while you're in the mall. Now imagine everyone doing that downtown.
Unless it's YOUR change.
If self-driving cars enable those for whom driving became dangerous to be mobile again, then so be it. Uber is that current solution, just without the freedom of being alone in the car. And even Uber wants to go driverless.
And if congestion is the problem, ignoring the need for roadway and capacity is the current solution, so what's the difference? Higher taxes for road improvement/construction/maintenance? Our current administration had/has the opportunity to 'invest' in infrastructure repair and improvement, to no avail. Taxes are better spent where they buy votes, and commuters, middle class moms, and commercial drivers are not potential voters for those who would control that spending.
The faster the better. I, for one, look forward to welcoming our self-directed overlords.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The problem with parking isn't that there's no parking, it's that there's no parking sufficiently close to where you want to go that you don't mind walking the remaining distance. With self-driving cars that can drop you off then go park themselves, and be summoned when you are ready to leave, this won't be a problem.
Just the fact that a SDC can drive much closer means that at least 2-3 times as many vehicles can fit in the same stretch of road as before. Combine that with the ability to replace traffic signals, stop signs, and it means faster driving overall. Highway intersections that require multi-level construction can be replaced by a simple four-way, with vehicle computers adjusting speed so they can go through safely and at highway speeds.
Of course, there is one reason why SDCs will be overall better than HDCs: Wrecks. Lower the chance of those happening, it it will help immensely. There is also the fact that SDCs don't get drunk, tripping, high, or in a state that renders them unusable for driving. This is arguably the chief cause of wrecks, so by that factor being further mitigates, it will help traffic flow and overall commute times significantly.
The US alone has over 1.5 TRILLION barrels of proven reserves that are recoverable at roughly $40/barrel. That's over 2 centuries at today's consumption rates. We're not going to run out, or even start running out, of oil for a VERY long time unless it's for purely political reasons.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Right now all that self-driving cars are clogging is our blogs and forums. It will be awhile before we know what they'll do in the real world. A variable, still to be determined 'awhile', mind you.
Where we live, our address wasn't even on the online mapping software until about six years ago. I'm not that expectant that a 'self driving car' will figure everything out immediately. Though I suppose they will 'learn' obscure locations by one or two manual drives there in 'learn mode.'
If you were single why not just buy a self-driving minivan and go wherever to sleep for the night? If you could rig it with some kind of simple shower and use an RV hookup ever week or so (that could be automated to happen while you were at work) it would be a better arrangement than most cramped first apartments...
The other thing to consider also, is that only a lot of miles built up in self-driving cars will give society the trust it needs to go ahead with the next step - self-driving flying cars (or drones if you will).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Imagine a fleet of hundreds of self driving buses, vans, et cetera
And every one of those is packed with other people.
If you don't think anyone who can will want their OWN self driving pod, the they do not have to wait to ride, you are nuts.
There will also be self-driving cars and buses, sure. But the price of a "car" will lower and more people than ever will own and use them because privacy and convenience will still be desirable for generations to come, if not forever...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Darwin is rolling over in his grave.
Have gnu, will travel.
No. One engine vs many. Less friction. Etc. Rail is still better.
If energy consumption is the only consideration, sure. But rail travel is inconvenient in important ways. You have to travel on the train's schedule and you have to use other modes of transportation to/from the rail station.
I can see self-driving cars killing commuter rail. Lots of rail commuters are presently accepting longer commute times in exchange for being able to read, work, sleep or whatever else on their way. Self-driving cars would allow them to do that and have the shorter commute times, and door to door service. Assuming traffic doesn't increase so much that congestion makes driving slower. Given fully-automated vehicles, though, it seems perfectly reasonable to have some automated-only lanes which reduce following distances to almost nothing and increase speeds to 100+mph. As traffic gets heavier human drivers slow down for safety, but automated systems don't necessarily need to do that. Increasing speeds increases throughput and allows a given amount of road to move more vehicles per unit of time.
Plus there are almost certainly a number of factors which will be utterly obvious in hindsight, but we don't see now. Tough to call.
You won't want self-driving cars to circle the block wasting juice. Each ride will be a separate rental from your chosen company's fleet. As you check out at the mall or the market, you summon a new ride. Released cars will rest in buffer lots near shopping areas until someone needs a new ride. These will differ from conventional parking lots in not having to be walking distance from shopping, and not being associated with specific shops. Instead, they will be at "summoning distance" from all shopping in a given area. Much less city land devoted to parking, because none of it has to be for "your" car. There will be no more inner-city crapola about "the rightmost ten spaces in this lot is reserved for customers of Bertha's Kitty Boutique."
I keep saying this.. people will have their cars drive around and around. Gas will always be cheaper than parking.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That's an awful primary solution. I don't want to wait 10 mins for a car, I want one in my driveway. Once they kill off the manual taxi industry, what will the wait and the quality of the cars be.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The summary also indicates that it would likely REDUCE congestion, at least in some areas.
Suppose right now my 20-mile commute takes 35 minutes, so for 35 minutes I'm causing part of the congestion. I'm in your way from 8:00 to 8:35. The summary says self-driving cars will likely be able to drive much faster (perhaps in what used to be HOV lanes). If my car goes faster, that means the 20-mile commute takes less time. I'd only be on the road(and in your way) for 20 minutes rather than 35 minutes.
Bars and everyone else. With less cost to travel, more discretionary spending will be available for all of us to spend elsewhere. There will be some industry that gets its lunch eaten, like traffic and parking enforcement, for-pay parking space, direct-to-consumer auto insurance, and the like; but this will be a boon to other industries (trucking, parcel delivery, taxi services, and travel lodging).
What will really be interesting is to see how SDCs perform optomally, if the right speed is really higher than HDCs, due to the drafting effects they can achieve over us. I think another thing that we have to think about as this catches on (and it certainly will, people never away from easier and more useful tech), is how roads may be different 20-30 years from now.
If SDCs flat-out replace HDCs, then roads may not need to be lit at night (assuming LIDAR or similar prevails), or paint may go away in favor of magnetic markers or something similar.
Actually I would be a lot more worried with self driving cars if I were an Uber driver. They may have courted technology to the point where they are replacing traditional taxis but technology is a fickle mistress and will probably soon be dumping them soon too.
The airline industry may contract somewhat but lets face it they don't make most of their money from short hops between cities within a few hours drive of each other. In fact if they are smart about it and run a self-driving airport bus service they can probably collect passengers from a wider area into a single airport and gain economies of scale.
All good points, but the elephant in this particular room is unexpected emergent behavior of a large coordinated system. If SDCs are centrally controlled, there's a single point of failure that will make EVERYONE late for work at unexpected intervals. If they are more distributed in their control systems, interesting (not in a good way) interactions will develop that cause unexpected system failures and disruptions.
Overall, I expect SDCs will improve the current state of automotive transport, but I don't expect them to be the panacea that everyone likes to paint a picture of.
If you live in the U.S. (anywhere other than the NE megalopolis) rail transport of people has been obsolete for a long long time already.
Right now, the people who ride city transit systems are for the most part not the same people who drive. Drivers are in the habit of using their cars whenever they can, and vote for transit only when they think that buses and trains will take people off the road and out of their way.
But once autonomous car use becomes general, the whole culture of "my car" will be replaced by a rental culture in which people summon a car when needed for single rides. The attraction of ditching car payments, insurance payments and the whole parking mess will just be too irresistible for ordinary people, especially in crowded urban areas.
So once you're used to being chauffeured everywhere in fleet vehicles, why not check the "Will share ride" box on your car-summoning app to ride in a multi-passenger vehicle when you can? Depending on the money to be saved by riding this way, people will pick up the neighborhood walking habits that distinguishes transit riders.
No congestion ever? Sounds like a communist plot to me. In true capitalism, the roads are only maintained and expanded as needed to address pressing issues - thus, there will always be congestion.
That is really all to be said about this alarmist drivel.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Haven't you used Uber? It tells you, with pretty high accuracy, how long it will take for a car to show up, how long the ride will take, and what the cost will be. You can summon your ride as you sit down for breakfast and by the time you are done it will be there. If you are out at dinner, you order the car when you get the check and it's there pretty much when you are ready for it. Surge pricing is a wonderful incentive to get people using cars when the roads are less busy, or to take a short trip to a train rather than to pay for a full commute. I think it is a great primary solution, and a natural evolution from services like Zipcar.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Also, SDCs can park much closer together, since the door doesn't need to open to disgorge humans, so they can park with only inches between cars. If they can retract their mirrors (or if the mirrors are replaced with cameras), then they can park even closer. If they have car-to-car communication, then they can park head-to-tail as well as side-by-side, and cooperate to make room for a summoned car to leave. A typical parking lot could hold 2 or 3 times as many SDCs as HDCs.
Commute times will drop significantly when there are self-driving-only lanes, and the makers come up with a single protocol for communication, so they operate more like an indefinite length train than a line of cars.
V2V is never going to be as reliable as a big steel coupling.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your chosen company? No, people will still own their own cars. Nobody wants to give up the MUCH higher convenience level of that. As such you'll still have all the same problems.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
must be nice to live in a location where there are actually lots of uber and/or taxis. Unfortunately for the majority of locations in the US, this is not the case.
they're everywhere here in socal; starting to feel like the payphone wave because of the easy money. you can already drive from LA to vegas on pure electric with an hour to stretch your legs at a fast charge station in barstow. charging pitstop towns will probably flourish like route 66 towns once did.
Your point applies only if SDCs are centrally controlled. If they are each an independent node that communicates with each other in a P2P or C2C method depending on massively decreased reaction times and localized road information that makes them much less vulnerable to a single point of failure while still retaining the bulk of the advantages. I foresee a hybrid of the 2 systems being the end solution, but I also bought Betamax, and laserdisc so who knows
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
That's an awful primary solution. I don't want to wait 10 mins for a car, I want one in my driveway.
You won't wait 10 minutes. This is a trivial problem in queuing theory. You have an algorithm to predict demand, and you preemptively dispatch cars to meet that demand. So when you walk out of the mall, the next car will pull up a few seconds after you request it. If demand is under predicted, you may wait a few more seconds, but not 10 minutes. If demand is over-predicted, you just have a few cars loop back to the staging lot.
Same thing with commuting from neighborhoods: The car companies will know the approximate number of cars needed for each neighborhood, and when they will be needed. So cars will arrive on your street just in time for you to summon one to your driveway. The company with the best prediction algorithm will have the highest vehicle utilization rate and the highest profits.
Really? We are posting entire pages by 'anonymous' now? These comments are not thought through properly, or even at all it seems. There will be a lot less congestion because now 2 people going from a to b and c, where b and c are moderately close - but not so close now that they would take the same car, can actually take the same car because neither of them have to find parking, walk from the park, walk back to the park or navigate headache creating traffic.
Furthermore, cars will not need to stop at lights when there any no pedestrians involved, reducing traffic further. They can travel at much higher speeds, reducing traffic. Families will on own 1 car because the 1 car return and do other errands after dropping off.... you guessed it, reducing traffic.
As far as the aero industry is concerned, who cares. industries die all the time. No body screamed when the wagon building industry closed...no body had a heart attack when the kerosene industry dried up, no body wept when the steam ship manufacturers had to find other things to make. These companies need to be at the front of technology, not at the tail end of it complaining when we find a way to actually get rid of the wastage and over usage of resources they have created while lining their pockets. No one seems to have mentioned that the car industry will essentially die off also, as there will be only 1/3 the requirement for vehicles. No one has noted that cabbies are immediately out of a job.. forever, and couriers, truck drivers, bus drivers... are we going to cry about them? are they going to get some kind of payout like the aero industry will no doubt put their hand out for?
If driverless cars are allowed as well, downtown traffic could get significantly worse: Right now, you have a choice of either use public transportation or a cab, or drive yourself and pay $$$ for premium parking.
With self-driving cars, there will be another option: Drive your own car to your office in downtown, and then send it along to park itself in some free or much cheaper parking place on the other side of town where it can wait until you are ready to be picked up again - that alone would lead to a lot of extra miles driven, and that's not even counting the disruption of stopping in traffic to let the owner back in at the end of the day.
Or come to think about it, why pay for parking at all? Need to do some shopping or a quick errand? I'm sure there will be plenty of people that would rather have their car circle the block on its own while they're inside instead of paying for parking....
Low-speed consumer rail, for sure. High-speed... probably not. That's why we need high-speed rail sooner rather than later. Otherwise, it will never get built, and we'll continue wasting huge amounts of energy unnecessarily sending passengers 30,000 feet up into the air until we run out of fossil fuels to power them.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Don't you believe it...
Around where i work, all the over 65s visit the bank during lunchtime, when those of us who have to work are on our lunch break. During the mornings and afternoons the banks are empty, the over 65s generally don't have to work yet for some reason they choose to visit banks during the most congested time, and cause those of us with a short time limited lunch break to waste all of it stood in a queue.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
No, people will still own their own cars.
The average American household has 2.3 cars. My family has 3. When on-demand SDCs are available, we will likely reduce that to 2, and maybe to 1. On demand SDC rides will almost certainly be cheaper than ownership. Ownership may not go away completely, but it will be drastically reduced.
Nobody wants to give up the MUCH higher convenience level of that.
You mean the convenience of walking 200 meters in the cold rain through a parking lot to get to your car, while the SDC-Uber customers are picked up at the curb, under an awning?
Full douche-mode. Glad that worked out for you. Your balls are somewhere back in common sense.
No!
They will not clog our highways.
They will clog our traffic jams.
Was that a trick question?
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
As well as driving the car, perhaps the software can choose an optimal time to leave so as to spread the traffic out as much as possible. Jams tend to happen where people all do the same thing at the same time (like go to work).
Haven't you used Uber?
No, I'm not a piece of shit. Uber is for pieces of shit.
4 hours of driving, at say 60 mpg(assuming it's a hybrid), at an average of 20 mph. That's 1.3 gallons. $5 worth of gas?
Now, how many towns wouldn't have somewhere free to park within 20 miles?
Or, what happens when the city, like a few cities already have, institute a 'congestion charge' that charges by the mile?
I don't read AC A human right
There were no commercial airlines on September 12, 2001.
Yes there was, I flew from Auckland to Wellington that day.
Circling the lot wasting juice... $10 in juice wasted... vs $30 to park for a few hours... I know what I'd choose...
It might be easier to avoid peak times too though, with a self driving car I can leave early and eat breakfast in the car, maybe even shave. Video chat with the wife on the way home so she won't mind so much being late getting back.
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And if Google's claims on self-driving cars prove to be true (And have we been given reason to believe otherwise?), the actuaries will update their tables, and premiums for manual-driving cars will skyrocket.
It's more likely that the premiums for self-driving cars will plummet. The factor that will cause them to skyrocket is that if every self-driving car is covered up to $10M(say) by the manufacturer, and they're proving to be that safe, is that society won't be satisfied with the $100k/300k, $250k/500k policies most people are running around with now, and require that private drivers carry $10M or so themselves (probably pausing at $1M, $5M, and such). While each subsequent dollar of coverage is cheaper than the first, so boosting liability to $1M won't double the cost over $500k, it will be a price increase, and you're looking that each dollar of insurance will be, say, around 10% the cost for a self-driver vs a person-operated. So it's a contest that the human driver can't win.
Especially for higher risk drivers. I figure known drunk drivers will very quickly find themselves in self-drivers. But what about new drivers? You'll see teenagers placed in self-drivers for the safety and insurance cut. Thing is, very few will subsequently become drivers. Because those high initial rates will always be waiting for them outside of some select occupations.
I don't read AC A human right
Yikes, now people are worrying about mass adoption of technology that isn't even available to the general public yet.
/.) need to get a life.
The authors of the article (and whoever submitted the article to
Majority by area, maybe, not population. We have Uber, and I live in a rather low-rent metro area of about 300k.
I don't live in a place with Uber. If I did, I wouldn't use them; I'm not convinced their drivers are vetted enough to be safe. Also I wouldn't want to encourage them in their failure to find real jobs. Or clog the roads.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You won't want self-driving cars to circle the block wasting juice. Each ride will be a separate rental from your chosen company's fleet.
This should be marked insightful - but you'll probably be pilloried. Think Uber, now think Uber without drivers. Now think vehicles being dispatched via the internet via an application on your smartphone.
Now think a driverless car version of surge pricing, as well with with a hierarchy of plans, where the more oyu pay, the better, and quicker service you'll get.
The legions of slashdot users that think they are going to all have their personal driverless vehicle are not thinking this through. As driverless vehicles take over, the only people left that know how to drive will be in rural areas.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So when you walk out of the mall, the next car will pull up a few seconds after you request it. If demand is under predicted, you may wait a few more seconds, but not 10 minutes.
That works until you combine multiple trips where you're picking things up in different places. If you don't have a dedicated vehicle you have to haul all that stuff around. I routinely will take a bicycle or two somewhere, go for a long ride, then stop a few places on the way home for shopping (sometimes bulk). So either I leave the stuff (which can add up to quite a lot) in the car and wait for the car, or I haul it around with me (unworkable). Parking lots local to the shopping work much better for my use case.
And if it's REALLY bad and we all just go semi-nomadic, crawling along from place to place at 1-2 mph, you could just work from your car and have a pizza drone bring you food, and the pet cleanup drones carry away your waste.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have a lot of stuff in my car, some could be extraneous or standard with a car service sure. The rest not so much. Standard safety bits could be in every one bout I doubt it to many people are clueless but realy the last thing I want to make a long drive through the desert in is a fleet car. Thats basic traffic safety and lets not get stranded can not picture a fleet car with duct tape, bailing wire, and enough tools to limp back to civilization. Past that you have first aid, I can pack a lot of stuff in a car kit including an AED, I dont see some fleet service stocking them standard, thats also a decent selection of OTC meds like headache and GI but also a supply of scripts. Basic provisions so thats a few days rations + more immediate snacks and water. Emergency clothing a spare pair of sweatpants and sweatshirt for everybody, more stuff for the baby, and rain gear all around. Lets not even start on baby's thats a lot of stuff all in itself. Simple bits like cell phone chargers and flashlights. In any event I'm got the better part of a duffel bag of stuff going around with me even more in the truck that I'm not wanting to take with me all the time to go vehicle to vehicle. This whole it will be a service is some sort of city folk thing that would not serve the other 99% of the land mass (or whatever the city to non city percentage is). Their only concern is parking and the mall it seems, not sure why I would want to go to the mall and parking is easy just stop living in the hell hole that is a city.
No sir I dont like it.
It will be interesting wether the trust and reliability will ever reach the point where a single autonomous vehicle will ever be safe enough to just fall asleep and expect to wake at your arrival point. With piloted mass transit vehicles this is possible because there is an attendant and/or security measure in place.
With individual vehicles, unless a lot of freedom is given up with regard to travel options, it's easy to expect there will be risks and uncertainties. Where might you wake up indeed?
Plus, cost savings = profits
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I have driven in some of the largest cities in the world. Generally it is not the volume of traffic that is the problem, but the screwups. If two people have a fenderbender on a major bridge, the entire system pretty much collapses while the two nitwits block everything.
Then the people who can go by safely will crawl by instead of whizzing by.
Next it is the nitwits who created many of our crap intersections, traffic patterns, lighting timings, etc, who have clogged our streets with 100 stuck east bound cars while 3 northbound cars get a 2 hour green.
Plus once it is 100% driverless then the cars can maintain very narrow lanes in a bumper to bumper formation. Thus I say the exact opposite. Driverless will zip around at speeds using the roads as efficiently as is possible. Thus one of the driverless changes will be a massive reduction in the amount of road infrastructure required.
I don't live in a major center, but even here parking is $15 an hour.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
This is assuming that people will be able to afford the gas or electricity. The way people gripe now about the cost, can't see them using it more.
The big steel coupling is a problem. Added weight, fails sometimes anyway. But if all the cars were independent, but in communication, then it works like they are connected, but can "disconnect" any time. "Reliable" isn't needed. Trains need "reliable" more because they cause so much damage if there's a problem. But cars kill people tens of thousands of times a year, "unreliable" is still 1000 times better than what we have now.
Learn to love Alaska
No, this is just the Green River formation in Colorado/Wyoming and Utah. ANWR and the other reserves push the 200 years to nearly 300...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
People walk about China with masks on because of PARTICULATES, not CO2. Source: me living there for most of a decade and traveling their regularly (including just getting back from a month over in China). Burn all that oil, and CO2 might increase to 700 PPM - which is about 1/10th the allowable limit for submariners (who regularly function for months on end above 7000 PPM).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There were no commercial flights on that one day in the US, but the airline's still existed.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Bars. So what you are saying is that "Driving While Intoxicated" V1.0 will be replaced with the non-criminal DWI V2.0 "Driven While Intoxicated." Love it.
Prostitutes will love it. "Hey, John, wanna have a little party?" "Sure, when." "My car with extra wide back seat will be here in 3 minutes and 22 seconds"
Philanderers having Nooners now will do it on the way to work.
Private Eyes will be dying to hack those cars for video footage.
Etc. Yes, it will transform *many* industries ... !
Hyperloop?
HAL only opens the cargo bay door if he thinks it would be the right thing to do.
SDC's will not need to park unless they are no longer need, like at night when most people are asleep. You won't own a SDC it will be a shared resource, it will drop you off at the shopping mall then immediately be available to pick someone up and take them home.
but realy the last thing I want to make a long drive through the desert in is a fleet car. Thats basic traffic safety and lets not get stranded can not picture a fleet car with duct tape, bailing wire, and enough tools to limp back to civilization.
Except that currently pictured self driving cars are in continuous contact with a central authority, so if it breaks down you're sent another fleet car to finish taking you to your destination with an apology and probably a refund. Car reliability has gone through the roof compared to when I was a kid.
As for the rest of your list a duffel bag should hold all of it comfortably.
But yes, I think you'll see a lot of ownership for customization purposes.
I don't read AC A human right
The point with a self-driving car is that $30 parking right next to your building would probably go away in favor of your car driving OUT of the city and parking there.
For example, let's say there's a stadium with hundreds of spots that aren't used except for game days. When it's not a game day, they just park there.
I don't read AC A human right
Pity we don't tax the profits of the land investors for the freeway, air pollution, health, education and welfare costs of sprawl
Instead, more gas tax, more Highway patrol, more surveillance, more divorce, more stressed out shootings, rammings and killings
Sometimes I despair of my fellow Americans Intelligence.
$40/barrel doesn't mean anything to me. How many barrels of oil need to be burnt to recover one barrel?
That's what the petro-apocalypse is, by the way. Everybody seems to miss that point.
Take off every 'sig' !!
I don't live in a major center, but even here parking is $15 an hour.
And where I live there's maybe one parking lot you have to pay for.
The point is that there's free parking somewhere. You might not be familiar with the locations, because 'out of the way' is ideal for them, but there's generally something somewhere.
For example, while I pay an annual fee for it, it's only 5 miles to get from the airport to my university's main parking lot. I could tell it to go park there. Done.
I don't read AC A human right
Much less city land devoted to parking, because none of it has to be for "your" car
So, if I want to visit, say, two stores, buy some things in one and some things in another, I will not be able to keep my purchases in the trunk while I am in the second store?
Also, I'd rather have my own car than rent (and pay) a car each time I want to go somewhere. Then I can keep some things in the car permanently (in case I need them on the road), have a good sound system or just use a model that I like.
picking up others who are along the way
Hmm, sounds interesting, maybe there will be some kind of rider matching service? A car with a single woman would pick up a rapist, a car with a single child would pick up a child molester, anyone is in the lottery of picking up a robber or serial killer.
I never stop for hitchhikers, I would not appreciate the taxi driver and especially a self driving car (since there is no driver for "2 against 1") doing the same. If all cars did that and I would be forced by law to use them (instead of my regular car), I would most likely be the first in line for a gun permit.
see high frequency trading. I suppose you could also make the argument that instant access to high calorie food helps obesity along (hot pockets anyone?). George Orwell wrote a well known book about TV and it's dangers. Cotton mills really did eliminate a lot of jobs ( among other inventions during the industrial rev).
The Luddites had a reason for being. They didn't spring up out of thin air. They were real people losing their livelihoods and they never got them back. Neither did their children. After about 80-100 years their grandkids started to see full employment as tech caught up.
That said I think the argument is off base. Rampant poverty brought on by automation will mean there won't be a lot of folks traveling. It's not like we're gonna build a public transportation network just _anyone_ can use out of these Self Driving Cars, right?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
LOL
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
As soon as self-driving cars are marginally affordable, you hitting someone will be partial negligence because you didn't have a SDC. This will force insurance rates up, which will reduce the comparative price of SDCs. This will in turn increase SDC sales, which will drive prices down. This will increase the negligence aspect of any crash in an HDC and increase lawsuit payouts, increasing insurance, etc.
There's a tipping point where you won't be able to afford an HDC -- you'll only be able to afford time-share SDCs and may later afford personal SDCs.
So yes, first the rich have them, then ultimately only the rich will be able to drive their own car.
You kind of lost me. If you don't live somewhere with Uber, then you probably don't have many regular cabs, either. Those guys can be quite terrifying. I haven't had an Uber car as dirty or terrifying as a typical city cab yet. In my experience, if you can live without a car, then taking the occasional cab/Uber is far, far more cost effective than ownership. In NYC, the price of parking alone more than covered transit pass, Zip car, and the occasional cab ride. That's kind of a special case, but it's true to a lesser extent in any city with decent transit.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Ha! You got an "informative" vote.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Agreed. This article is not just wrong, it's obviously so. It was written by someone who know nothing about the topic. We see a lot of these. It shows a fundamental problem with the story acceptance system of slashdot.
Philly suburbs... not exactly Manhattan, but also not Podunk. City cabs in Philly are OK (if a little terrifying) downtown, but cabs are a PITA out here. You call dispatch on the phone, and every company has their own number. They always tell you 20 minutes. Sometimes it's true, sometimes they never come at all. Not sure why the private taxi companies haven't banded together and put out a proper dispatch app to make at least a token effort at improving the experience.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
A car park with cars parked right next to each other will need to be defragged.
Just the fact that a SDC can drive much closer means that at least 2-3 times as many vehicles can fit in the same stretch of road as before. Combine that with the ability to replace traffic signals, stop signs, and it means faster driving overall. Highway intersections that require multi-level construction can be replaced by a simple four-way, with vehicle computers adjusting speed so they can go through safely and at highway speeds.
None of which can happen unless you have SDC only roadways. For as long as SDCs have to share the roadway with normal motorists, things won't change much.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
A self driving car would only need a mirror if there was a manual option. And even then a mirror would be redundant as rear situational awareness for the human driver could easily be provided on interior monitors. I also think an autonomous-car future would see a lot of car sharing to public transport hubs. A-Cars won't need to park. They will circulate from ride to ride. At least in cities. And that is where most people will be living if trends continue. People in dense population centers don't own cars even when they can afford them. Check out car ownership stats for Manhatten . What can one say about a Johnny Cab? It will be cheap. And no tip. Of course in low density population areas people will own their own cars or co-own cars.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
I keep saying this.. people will have their cars drive around and around. Gas will always be cheaper than parking.
More likely electricity than gas.... and the cars won't just be driving around, car owners will have their cars picking up and delivering people or goods to their destinations. You paid good money for that vehicle, why not have it earn some income for you while you're not using it?
As for the potential congestion -- if that becomes a problem, you can expect cities to start charging a fee for road usage, e.g. 1 cent per minute your car is driving within city limits. That would quickly put an end to people abusing the streets as moving parking lots.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Abolish Airlines, make way for personal drones. Why should a few fat cats monopolize the airspace? Think millions of Drones vs a handful of Airliners.
OK, transoceanic routes for SST's.
That's an awful primary solution. I don't want to wait 10 mins for a car, I want one in my driveway.
You won't wait 10 minutes. This is a trivial problem in queuing theory. You have an algorithm to predict demand, and you preemptively dispatch cars to meet that demand. So when you walk out of the mall, the next car will pull up a few seconds after you request it. If demand is under predicted, you may wait a few more seconds, but not 10 minutes. If demand is over-predicted, you just have a few cars loop back to the staging lot.
Same thing with commuting from neighborhoods: The car companies will know the approximate number of cars needed for each neighborhood, and when they will be needed. So cars will arrive on your street just in time for you to summon one to your driveway. The company with the best prediction algorithm will have the highest vehicle utilization rate and the highest profits.
It's not a "trivial problem".
It has very little to do with "queuing theory" (which isn't an actual theory, nor is it a legitimate field of study; at best, "queuing theory" is a loose application of math in a business/logistics environment).
And you don't just "have an algorithm to predict demand", you have to actually model demand and develop that algorithm and adjust it constantly, taking into account everything from weather to the PTA meeting schedule.
It's a very complicated problem that you're oversimplifying, and even as someone who's never used Uber or similar services, I can still fucking tell you your "You won't wait 10 minutes." claim is a joke and a half.
Your trivial example of Ubers waiting at malls works because malls have a high density of people wanting to get into a car at any given moment.
Your idea of pre-sending the correct number of Uber drivers out to residential streets in the hopes that they'll be called up is absurd. Taxis don't patrol residential streets, nor do airport shuttles, rickshaws, or buses. It's not efficient. It's not profitable. When going from low density to high density the rider must schedule a pick up time in advance, and unless you're close to a major destination and you're calling in at a busy time, it'll often be more than 10 minutes in advance.
. It is unlikely that they will increase congestion.
File->Save.
Most large cities have traffic volumes greater than capacity during peak hours, no change in driver type will change that.
If we assume robot cars will be better, we it follows there will be more of them, so this problem cannot get better.
The only solution to transport that scales in large cities is rail. We already have robot trains, we already know it works. This is not a technology problem, but one of political will (and better urban planning).
You can summon your ride as you sit down for breakfast and by the time you are done it will be there. If you are out at dinner, you order the car when you get the check and it's there pretty much when you are ready for it.
So in my family of four, we could in theory order four robot cars (we each work and go to school at different locations). In my use case, that makes 4 times as many vehicles on the road. A road that is already over capacity today.
I think you missed the point of TFA
You won't own a SDC it will be a shared resource,
Oh right, that's freedom right there....
Just the fact that a SDC can drive much closer means that at least 2-3 times as many vehicles can fit in the same stretch of road as before.
My commute is a car park. The only way to fit more cars in, robot or otherwise is to stack them on top of each other.
I'm terribly confused. Do you use 4 different cars right now? Why is the robot car somehow less capable? If you have 4 person-trips occurring right now, and 4 person-trips occurring with the robot car, why do you feel this adds congestion to the roads?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You mean the convenience of walking 200 meters in the cold rain through a parking lot to get to your car, while the SDC-Uber customers are picked up at the curb, under an awning?
That won't happen because it doesn't scale. 30 people can exit a building *and* clear out of the entrance at a rate of 1 person per second. 30 people getting into cars at the entrance is going to take roughly ten minutes.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
It would result in far less cars on the road. Why? Because many more people would not care to own one but only that one would take them where they wished pretty much when they wished. The rest of the time the car would suffer the needs of other would be passengers instead of being parked idle at an office complex or such and then driven home. It would result in the most efficient use of cars to do desired traveling. IT is doubtful much more travel than today would be desired. It even more doubtful that more cars would be on the road.
While microwaves may be safer and cheaper than regular ovens, the alarmist press warns they could also create obesity "The problem, say kitchen appliance researchers, is that people will use them too much."
And that happened.
While televisions may be safer and cheaper than traveling to the theater, the alarmist press warns they could also create widespread job loss among stage actors "The problem, say media researchers, is that people will use them too much."
That also happened
While wooden tables may be safer and cheaper, the alarmist press warns they could also create more expensive wood "The problem, say carpentry researchers, is that people will use them too much."
So did that.
Are there any random products you couldn't fill into this sentence? Very meaningful speculation... why, it's almost Luddite....
If Luddite means doesn't blindly accept every new device or gimmick without thinking through the possible implications, then yes.
Taxis don't patrol residential streets, nor do airport shuttles, rickshaws, or buses. It's not efficient. It's not profitable.
That is because 98% of the people are driving their own car. But once on-demand rides are used by many people, residential streets will be high demand areas. For an SDC, the cost of waiting is near zero.
Until the greedy owners figure it out and start charging $20 to park.
... and then another parking lot undercuts them by only charging $10, and then a bunch of homeowners undercut them by renting out space in their driveways for $5, and then ...
I'm terribly confused. Do you use 4 different cars right now?
We have one car, everyone else takes the bus. But if we had the choice of Robot-Uber at bus-like prices, it would add 4 times as many cars on the road.
This is what TFA is suggesting.
Do you also want to own your own elevator? Nearly everyone considers an elevator to be a shared resource, yet some people want to own a car. Why is horizontal travel so different from vertical travel?
Not sure why the private taxi companies haven't banded together and put out a proper dispatch app to make at least a token effort at improving the experience.
Sounds like a short-term business opportunity!
Though perhaps it could leverage you into a larger opportunity where you can hail driver/driveless cars from many companies, not just Uber or the growing Lyft conglomerate.
We do have an obesity 'crisis', we've also gotten a whole new industry focused on health foods.
Stage actors are few and far between; that career path adapted towards TV acting.
Deforestation happens; he talked about over-forestation, are you dense? .
Automation has caused unemployment, yes. Some people have taken up other careers.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I had the same initial thought of summing purchases through a shopping day in a single vehicle. But maybe you load your purchases from each store into a box (perhaps standard sized reusable boxes instead of bags), and a self driving car drops it off at your residence or secure pickup area. With drone delivery around the corner (or at slowest SDC + robot delivery), will we be carrying lots of stuff around?
Brick and mortar stores may last for a long time, especially if they can compete with delivery like Amazon; the delivery of goods may well change with self driving vehicles.
Two things wrong with your scenario.
1. Why blow 4 hours worth of gas when you could just tell the car to go home and call it back when you want it?
2. Who says people will even OWN self driving cars? Car cooperatives are exploding in popularity now, and that's where you have to live within a certain area to be able to use them. What do you think will happen when the car can be ordered to come to you? If you're a member of an SDC collective, just send it back into the pool after it drops you off, and request another when you're getting ready to leave.
In case more people will usw cars then the Highways will be filled. Traffic jams will occur reducing the average speed. Therefore, moving more in suburban areas will not be an option. As there was s no space for new roads and no money to support existing roads , traffic will get worse. Cars are not the solution for urban an inter city travel. Rail systems are, as they allow to travel faster and in a more compact way.
That works until you combine multiple trips where you're picking things up in different places.
So you rent a "modular luggage pod", and that gets parked for you, instead of a vehicle, or goes through a separate network of automated cars causing your pod contents to be hauled to your chosen destination separate from you.
Most of the congestion I've seen in Vancouver, Canada is from piss poor driving skills.
Lot of the slow down is caused by shitty merging, slow merging, slow exits, poor acceleration to match speeds causing frequent accordion effects. Unsure drivers get in front from merge lanes not at the highway speed frequently. It causes a lot of slow downs, it adds up over the day, which makes it worse as these poor skilled drivers cause even more problems as the space between vehicles is reduced.
So basically, their lack of skill increases the difficulty of driving, which makes them cause even more slow downs.
If we have self driving cars simply driving properly it will already significantly reduce congestion. In a perfect system all cars could go the speed limit always without being slowed down. (Perfection is impossible, but we should be able to get a lot closer than where we are now)
Just the fact that a SDC can drive much closer means that at least 2-3 times as many vehicles can fit in the same stretch of road as before. Combine that with the ability to replace traffic signals, stop signs, and it means faster driving overall. Highway intersections that require multi-level construction can be replaced by a simple four-way, with vehicle computers adjusting speed so they can go through safely and at highway speeds.
You like many other people in this thread seem to be making one, very unreasonable, assumption...
Or are you suggesting that actual persons will be forbidden to drive their non-self-driving cars on the roads?
At what point in the future do you envisage this 'autopia' occurring?
Elevator travel is usually point-to-point. You get in (carrying your luggage), you get out (still carrying your luggage). Also, travel distances (and times) are quite short, if you need multiple trips to get all your luggage, you can, assuming you have a friend or someone else to guard your luggage
Car may be used for point-to-point travel (same as elevator), but can also be used for multidrop travel to pick up more luggage at each stop, drop off luggage at each stop or a combination of both. Also, travel distances and times are usually longer than with an elevator, so it may be inconvenient to convert your multidrop journey to star shaped journey.
For example, I want to visit 3 stores to buy some items and bring them all back home. The stores are closer to each other than to my home, so it is inefficient to go to store A, then home, then to store B etc.
It still has more information than usual. Even if it only knows that you're going when you actually enter the vehicle, it can still avoid places known to be currently congested or almost congested, or to be congested or almost congested by the time you'd arrive there if that particular route were to be chosen.
Ezekiel 23:20
Yes, you're absolutely right (oh wait, you were being sarcastic?).
Owning a car is a real pain that I would prefer not to do. It costs a lot of buy and then a lot to insure and then a lot to maintain and repair. I'm willing to pay for that at the moment for the convenience it adds to my lifestyle. A shared resource spreads all those costs and will probably be even more convenient. I won't need to worry about how to get my car home in the evening if I want to have a drink after work since I won't have taken it to work in the morning - that's freedom right there. I wouldn't be tied to my car. I don't need to worry about finding parking in the city. That frees up a lot of time, searching for a spot and walking from and back to the car park. That's freedom.
Also I don't need to worry about where to park it at night, I could convert my driveway to be a place that I can enjoy the use of. All those city streets packed with on road parking would be freed up - imagine how pleasant streets could be if they were jam packed with parked cars, more dedicated cycle lanes, more room for kids to play and more room for leafy trees.
You must have larger parking spaces than we do in the UK, we barely get room to open the door enough to get out as it is.
So which one are they worried about?
People use them too much and traffic grinds to a halt?
Or people choose to use them instead of flying because they can go over 100 mph on highways?
It's not going to work both ways, guys.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Until a law is passed preventing the later and the car park managers get together in secret meetings to fix the price or a someone buys up all the local carparks owner to prevent the former.
And no anti-trust won't prevent the local monopoly as it is local not nation wide.
Another advantage will be that SDC manufacturers will likely become SDC service providers and that then gives them an incentive to make the vehicle efficient and reliable. They will pay for any downtime or inefficiency rather than you since you're just paying for the service of having the vehicle available when you want it. So there will be much less "hey look how good our car looks and how much sex you could be having if only you owned one of our vehicles" and then finding that it breaks down just as soon as the warranty is over or ends up costing you a fortune in fuel/oil/whatever. Instead they will be packing in sensors and preemptively fixing problems before they get serious and expensive; they will be designing the vehicles to last longer and be serviceable easily and they'll want to get the best mileage for the fuel they supply.
Or make them single user smaller vehicles and create more lanes? How many people on their commute have one person in a large vehicle because as a family they need the capacity for the whole family a few times a week, but in the majority of cases it's only got one person in it? With SDCs you won't own it, you will request a vehicle that is suitable for the journey so for commutes it will be a small single user vehicle, or the weekend or family trips it will be a larger vehicle. You won't have to compromise on the form factor of the one vehicle you buy, you will pay for the service that they want when you want it.
Why wouldn't they recharge themselves? It's pretty easy to design a charging station that a robotic car can attach itself to. You're still thinking in terms of the manual plug and cable that is designed for us humans to use easily. Robots won't need that.
"do you know how to earn 1 million dollar ? Invest 1 billion in the airline industry".
The airline industry is unfortunately under attack by low cost, and there has been a few incidents which hit it very hard. it is the very first industry to suffer in case of crisis. The low cost carrier are putting price traditional airline can only follow to the bottom of service. You want cheap flights ? well this is the result : a race to the bottom in quality. Nobody buys a 1000$ comfortable flight when they can get away with a 120$ uncomfortable one. Except that afterward they keep yapping and complaining about it. You want a meal service no overbooking and good seat pitch ? Take business and first. The service is still good there. But I am betting like 99+% of the complainer that you fly eco like most of the people. Well you get what you pay for. Compare the price of a boston-new york flight of today with one of 30 or 40 years ago : price have fallen not risen with inflation, there has been a lot of bankruptcy. Yes airline try to get back at rising cost and lowering airfare with amenities. You want to see the responsible ? Look in a frigging mirror. People want cheap airfare but first class quality. Good luck with that.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I assume that you stop at least once during that journey. If the SDC didn't have enough range to get you there in one charge, you'd likely either want to stop for coffee or meal which would give it enough time to recharge, or if you truly are in a hurry (why didn't you get the express train instead?) then you probably swap at a service stop for fully charged SDC - after all you won't need to own the SDC it'll just be a service you pay for, giving you a vehicle that meets your requirements for the journey you are taking. You won't want the same vehicle for the daily commute as you would for a long cross country drive.
Sure some people (probably most) won't want to share a ride, but for some the reduced cost would be mean that they are fine with. People share buses or trains now, this will be more like that.
Yes, insurance companies won't need to get the data from Google, they will get it from the customer or directly themselves by aggregating claims and costs for SDCs vs HDCs.
Taxis don't patrol residential streets ..... It's not efficient. It's not profitable.
That is because 98% of the people are driving their own car. But once on-demand rides are used by many people, residential streets will be high demand areas. For an SDC, the cost of waiting is near zero.
No, taxis prefer not to pick up from residential areas because they know that people are unreliable. Even if the taxi has been booked, they can take a long drive out to the suburbs and find the passenger needs another 10 minutes to get ready or even does not show up. Taxis would rather pick up fares from the steady demand at a railway station, city centre or airport. They definitely do not patrol residential areas.
Basically, the end of taxis and busses, ie. no more paid drivers.
I wonder how the costs would work out though. If you don't have to pay drivers, would they be cheap enough for everyone? I guess it could be a human right, like how some countries make broadband a human right, but obviously, some people will pay more for better quality cars.
I wonder how much of the current cost of taxi services is the drivers?
It is unlikely that they will increase congestion. It is far more likely that they will help relieve congestion. Large fixed-route public buses will be replaced by small self-driving vans, with flexible on-demand routing. ....... more people will use it, reducing congestion
They do that now in UK cities with mini-buses (say 8 seaters), but of course with drivers. It is for old people, and called dial-a-ride. Not from personal experience, but the system is shit, and only used by old people with no alternative. The journey takes years because the mini-bus is zig-zagging around the city and its suburbs to pick up people (orders come on the radio all the time) and dropping people off at different places. That's on top of waiting an hour for it to turn up in the first place.
But those old folk think it's great as the long (timewise) journey is their only social life. Can't see it being attractive to most people (self-driving or not). Such systems would have taken off generally already if they were any good; the self-driving is an orthogonal factor
If people/governments/corporations can listen to such concerns they may be able to mitigate them so the overall benefits outweigh the tradeoffs.
For example the infrastructure will need to be changed to allow for self driving car to drive much closer together and/or utilize the road differently. So during rush hour times there may be an extra lane northbound than southbound.
Also self driving cars may become more of a ride sharing concept where you are pricked up and dropped off at a fee, This fee per kilometer can be a deterrent from excess travel. Even though people will pay more per mile with their car when they factor in all the costs, being that they are having to pay upfront costs curves their behavior.
Also there may be some initiatives such as greater acceptance towards work from home jobs. As many white collar jobs consists of a person driving miles to work to sit in front of a computer with an internet connection, they are in that room all day, and go home where they have a computer with an internet connection (This will have its own tradeoffs too)
When you get warnings listen to them, but don't overreact. Just plan to deal with the tradeoffs. Nearly every technology has a tradeoff. That is what there are so many flame wars on technology sites. Because Product A sacrificed feature X to give you a better feature Y while Product B sacrificed feature Z to give a better feature X. So the flame war will go like this....
FW1: B is superior to A because feature X really helps me, and that feature Y isn't that bad either, besides I don't need Z anyways.
FW2: A is superior to B because feature Y is better than any other system and feature Z is done rather well too. With Y and Z there is no need for X.
FW1: to FW2 you are just an idiot.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The problem with parking isn't that there's no parking, it's that there's no parking sufficiently close..... With self-driving cars that can drop you off then go park themselves, and be summoned when you are ready to leave, this won't be a problem.
In the context of congestion this is part of the problem (in addition to those mentioned in TFA). Because :-
1) Where before people would have used say the metro or other public transport (because there is insufficient city city centre parking - in London, Paris Moscow etc vast numbers of people are carried by the underground railways), many will be inclined to use SD car instead. For the very point you make, SD cars are more attractive. That's bad enough, but ....
2) Having reached their city destination, they will send their SD car back home in the suburbs (rather than pay a city centre car parking fee), or at least part of the way, and then call it back again when they wish to leave. So journey miles are further doubled.
Of course many here are assuming SD cars being operated like taxis (as I believe you are). No doubt some will be and some won't be. Taxis are nothing new and have never reduced traffic congestion.
Then you put the goods in a marked bin in the car, which is unloaded at the staging lot and consolidated with any other purchases, then delivered to your home later.
Alternately, you might even skip the step of loading the goods in the car, that part might be taken care of by the vendors themselves.
Hang on, hang on.
We started this discussion about the viability of SD cars and It seems that you advocates can only justify them by assuming all sorts of further super-efficient infrastructure and organisations will pop into existence to make them viable.
It is telling that some such infrastructure already exists (as you say) and proves itself far from efficient. "Purchases delivered to your home "? I've tried that and it's a nightmare. Either I am not in when it arrives (they can't just leave it on the doorstep) or they deliver the wrong stuff (I ordered some canned groceries once and got 10 fresh cabbages) or they can't even find your place.
Case rested.
Until the greedy owners figure it out and start charging $20 to park.
... and then another parking lot undercuts them by only charging $10, and then a bunch of homeowners undercut them by renting out space in their driveways for $5, and then ...
The market will determine that it will only go down to a price round about the same as what it would cost in juice either driving around or driving out far enough to where there is plenty of free parking. In districts where there are homes with driveways (in the UK anyway) parking for free in the street is usually possible anyway (because the homeowners park on their driveways!).
But from the centre of London for example you would need to drive out about 10 miles to find a district of homes with driveways, and there are no sports stadiums very near either. Which comes back to the point that sending SD cars away to find parking (avoiding astronomical city centre parking fees) is only adding more to traffic movements and congestion.
Sharing a bus usually gives safety in numbers, since there probably are fewer criminals than normal people on the bus (though I hear groping women in trains is quite popular in Japan). There is also the driver who may help you if you and the criminal are the only passengers on the bus. OTOH, with a car and if you are alone (with the criminal) then you'll have a bad day.
The company with the best prediction algorithm will have the highest vehicle utilization rate and the highest profits.
Ha, you are kidding yourself. The company that takes "passengers" to the place most profitable for the company (note, not the passenger) will have the highest profits. Passengers are powerless against companies, remember ?
Some passengers might be able to hack their cars to take them to their own preferred destination - until they are jailed for violating the grand-daddy of DMCA.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Having endured 2 hours on i-95 south of Washington last Friday, the two biggest wins for self driving cars are (1) self driving cars don't slow down 30% to look at oddities on the side of the road, like broken down vehicles or wrecks which are clearly out of the flow of traffic and (2) know how to fucking merge when lanes reduce or at on-ramps. That alone would reduce traffic enough to accommodate all the new driver miles.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
>Unless you are more than 100 years old, you have never lived during a time when there were no commercial airlines.
100 years is definitely "not that long ago". It is a merely 0.1% of RECORDED history, which is itself a mere 100th of a percent of the history of the human race, and that is still only about 1/4 of 1000th of a percent of the history of life.
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In many places, you cannot just put people usually taking mass transportation in cars (self-driving or not), and call it a day. There are typically more than one thousand people in a commuter train at peak hours. The road infrastructure is not sized for that.
This can be easily observed on strike days... many places are completely clogged up by traffic jams.
The Manhattan CBD, which has a much higher density of roads than any other place in America and in which millions work every day, has a carrying capacity of about 6,000 moving cars at any one time. If you lower the cost of keeping a car moving on the road even more then there will be more cars occupying that space.
There is a solution, we can charge a per minute fee for using the public road space. In the most dense areas $0.10/min on 10-25 mph streets, $0.15/min on 30-45mph roads, $0.20/min on 45-60mph roads, etc.
But we are all so used to being freeloaders that it is politically difficult to implement any kind of user fee for existing asphalt. Things will get much much worse before we put in place any sensible solution.
This article focuses on one variable in a far more complex formula with many variable that are changing. Here are just a couple obvious likely changes
There will be fewer cars:
Many families who currently have two cars will need only one because they will be able to summon the car making sharing practical
The cost of taxi service will plummet and many people won't need a car at all
Bus service will transform into a fleet of smaller vehicles with many more routes
Roadways will be more efficient:
Self driving cars won't slow down to see accidents
They will automatically route around congestion
They will follow consistently at a safe distance at the road's currently rated speed
They will coordinate their speed to coordinate intersection passage by bunching north-south and east-west traffic to be 180 degrees out of phase
Speed limits will be raised significantly because safety margins will become less necessary
TFA ignores other advancements in competing transportation technologies including hyper loop, improved rail and ride sharing of various kinds.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Actually - if you get your head out of your ass you would realize that is a nett INCREASE in freedom.
More people will be able to go more places more easily than now. Exactly because the freedom to use the road will not be limited to those who can drive and afford a car.
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Tesla's Model X does actually open the door for you too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Also known as a Target-Rich Environment.
>Or are you suggesting that actual persons will be forbidden to drive their non-self-driving cars on the roads?
Nope, there is no need for that. The advantages of self driving cars are so significant - that automakers will rapidly start manufacturing them and they will be greatly cheaper and it will, in fact, only be a brief period of time before they completely stop making manually driven cars because the market will simply be too small to be worth it. Around the same time the last generation of hand-drives have to be retired, you will have an entire generation of people who have never learned how to drive.
Simple economics will kill hand-driving in less than 2 decades. Even if somebody DID pass a law banning them on safety reasons (which would be no less reasonable than any other roadworthiness laws once superior technologies exist) - they would not be doing anything with that law that economics itself would not have done within a few years.
Nobody had to ban horse-drawn carriages to make them virtually extinct, once cars existed - that happened all by itself in a very, very short period of time. The change to self driving cars is more likely than not to mirror the change from carriages to cars. Here in my major metropolis I still see the odd donkey-pulled cart on the road - and actually the law did the OPPOSITE of what you fear, there are traffic laws on the books specifically making allowances for them by dictating how car drivers are to drive around them, how to pass them safely etc. etc.
You can expect the SDCs to likewise have compensating code to deal with hand-driven cars, and any other car failing to communicate in the right protocols.
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Lol.. so now my child might be sitting alone in a car with another random passenger? This gets better and better.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Car insurance liability is unlimited in the UK and I believe most of Europe. It's still affordable, unless you are under 25 in which case it is insane for other reasons.
Also, manufacturers won't accept liability after the first few years of high price vehicles being on the market. Once insurance companies are satisfied that they are safe, cheaper models will require the owner to insure them as normal.
I'm kind of shocked that you can get a policy that only covers the other party for $300k. That's not even enough for one person's medical bills, let along if you hit a bus...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
>If we assume robot cars will be better, we it follows there will be more of them, so this problem cannot get better.
That is not actually true because you're ignoring a major factor. Right now time spent in traffic on a commute is a time wasted unproductively. It does not benefit society nor the individual in any way. It's a huge cost that gets amortized over everybody and which nobody gets any benefit out of - a textbook example of market failure (literally - a great many economics textbooks use traffic jams to explain market failures).
With SDC's even if congestion DOES remain a problem AND gets worse- it's no longer an issue. The time is no longer wasted. You can spend that time working, or reading a book, or watching a movie. The time you spend getting to and from work is no longer time you LOSE - it's time back for yourself to use however you wish. That is a MASSIVE gain for everybody.
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>the self-driving is an orthogonal factor
That's absolutely false - since you're ignoring the main difference between self driving and these services: self driving can economically be individualized. You don't have to wait an hour for a vehicle that's taking a horribly inefficient route to pick up a bunch of other people, or spend twice as long in it because it's going so many other places first. It picks YOU up, and drops YOU off. If anything it will take LESS time than using your own car does now.
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You talk about cities charging for congestion like that is a desirable outcome. First of all it's going to be a long time before cities are technologically advanced enough to do that, and secondly if that is what autonomous cars are going to bring on then I'll stick with the manual solution.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We have a lot of cabs and buses. Never had a problem with a cabbie. We have already had a shooting by an Uber driver; how many of those will there be?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It is a large complaint in our city that there is no free parking in the central part of the city. The street spots that are there are largely taken up by people who are working but have learned to rotate their cars to avoid parking tickets. An automated car looking for parking will need to be very good at parallel parking in tight spots, but more then likely it will either have to drive out of the central area to find a spot. Either way, it is likely that it will be driving for a large amount of time relative to the stop whether it is driving to the outskirts for a spot or circling around looking for one suitable.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Currently the biggest problem with rail is reliability - fewer points of failure. I use rail for my commute since it's cheaper than driving, less stressful and I can get shit done during the commute - but over the past few weeks trains have frequently been facing huge delays. In this case due to vandalism and arson (Cape Town). A few arsonists made millions of commuters late for work for many weeks but many other (non-deliberate) problems could cause the same.
It's harder to do that with cars - there are always alternative roads so you can't just block one up and cause huge issues, and many individual machines means the impact of a breakage only affects one person instead of thousands.
This is a problem with commuter rail - especially in countries like mine where, for millions of people, it is literally the ONLY viable way for them to get to work because cars are simply too expensive.
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And when I have more than a couple of stops, and have stuff to carry? I'm sure as shit not going to drag it all around with me. Sure planning could alleviate some of that, but for many scenarios, it just doesn't work. We use our vehicles as temporary storage, and that's not going to stop.
Just another day in Paradise
It's funny how the laws of capitalism go away when there are discussions like this. But when the service turns up and sucks because, profits, people will defend their right to make as much money as possible at the expense of the consumer.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I'm not worried about getting stranded where there is cellphone reception. Worried about getting stranded where I'm looking at ham radio or sat based communications. I doubt the fleet cars will be putting in sat uplinks.
While everything fits in the duffel it's not something that you want to drag around with you vs leaving in the car.
No sir I dont like it.
>Deforestation happens; he talked about over-forestation, are you dense? .
OP made two separate points about - one about forestation and one about the price of wood. GP replied to only one of them and you're scolding him based on the other (which he did not reply to - so your response makes no sense).
OP never claimed the over-forestation one happened - he claimed the price of wood went up, which it did. My house was built in 1948 as part of a large development to build houses for returning WW2 soldiers. It has Oregon-pine flooring. Back then this was cheap flooring tech for low-cost housing. Today, this old house is actually a very expensive and valuable property, and a huge chunk of that value comes from those floors. Do you have any idea what it would cost to build a large 3-bedroom house with a (very large) lounge with Oregon pine flooring today ? Based on the price of that wood today, more than half the sales price I bought this house for last year is JUST the value of the wood in the floors !
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As we'll work in our cars, the journey will be like:
-Four hours commute in the morning, answering emails, having teleconferences and writing docs.
- Reach the office, take a coffee, socialize, eat. Eating optionally can be done in the car too.
- Back in the car, that evening jam isn't going to form by itself.
- Four hours commute back home, more work in the car. In the quiet environment, people is incredibly productive.
- Work not finished, still a teleconference to do. The car has to circle the neighborhood a couple of times to allow for your overtime. You cannot really teleconference from home, that would be unprofessional. While waiting for the last person to connect from the London traffic jam, you chat a bit with your neighbor, that is also being driven around, just to chill a bit, have a smoke.
And that will be the working day of the near future. Going on vacation will be similar, but with the kids in the back seat with VR helmets enjoying the forest you are going to, with added gnomes and elves, (optional item, in-app purchase).
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
My home town still doesn't have a commercial airline.
My home town doesn't have a nuclear power plant, what's your point?
There were no commercial airlines on September 12, 2001.
Assuming you mean in the US, there were as many commercial airlines that day as on Sept 11, 2001. They might have not had planes in the sky, but they were still commercial airlines.
You mean the convenience of walking 200 meters in the cold rain through a parking lot to get to your car, while the SDC-Uber customers are picked up at the curb, under an awning?
You can do that already with a human-driven Uber.
Where's the benefit from a self-driving version?
Because I don't have to sit down in an elevator where random people committed unknowable unsanitary acts.
By platooning, SDCs can drive much closer together than HDCs, and they also help to smooth out the "accordion effect" in stop-and-go traffic. It is unlikely that they will increase congestion. It is far more likely that they will help relieve congestion.
Large fixed-route public buses will be replaced by small self-driving vans, with flexible on-demand routing. As public transit becomes faster and more convenient, more people will use it, reducing congestion even more.
I wonder why the transportation researchers interviewed in the linked article didn't think of that? Or maybe they did and their research shows that platooning won't be enough to offset the problem?
As for replacing buses, with on demand cars, who will purchase those vehicles? The people who ride busses? They could purchase cars today, but don't. The government? Well, that would be one way to subsidize the auto industry -- replace one bus carrying 50 people with 50 vehicles carrying one person. But again, that model is already in existence. It's called a cab or uber if available in your area.
There is faster, more convenient and cost effective. It's likely you can't have all three of those for public transit.
this new technology opens doors for me.
They drive themselves, but I think you still have to open the door yourself.
Lazy bastard.
Actually, for disabled people you would want the doors to open for people. Japanese taxis already have mechanical-operated doors as standard.
(Yes, I understand this was supposed to be a joke.)
Parking is the biggest issue. When you go downtown, you can't find a parking spot. But that's not an issue with self driving cars, you just tell it to circle the block at low speed for 4 hours while you're in the mall. Now imagine everyone doing that downtown.
Yes, because the autonomous vehicles will generate their own power and have parts that never wear out. With all of those slow moving vehicles circling around, how will regular traffic get through?
Also, SDCs can park much closer together, since the door doesn't need to open to disgorge humans, so they can park with only inches between cars. If they can retract their mirrors (or if the mirrors are replaced with cameras), then they can park even closer. If they have car-to-car communication, then they can park head-to-tail as well as side-by-side, and cooperate to make room for a summoned car to leave. A typical parking lot could hold 2 or 3 times as many SDCs as HDCs.
That's how a freight yard works for the railroad. Of course, if the car is in the middle of the line, and you need to move 100 cars to get to yours, it will be about as efficient as a railroad trying to cherry pick a single car out of the yard. It simple won't happen.
>Around where i work, all the over 65s visit the bank during lunchtime,
Actually they probably don't. By nature of my career I've frequently not been working office hours so I got to observe these things a bit better than most. Banks cut costs by employing fewer people when most are at work. The thing is, if you show up at 8am on a Monday morning- there is a long queue and very few tellers serving them (often just one)... and many of them will still be waiting in line when lunchtime comes around (and the bank adds more tellers for the expected extra lunch-time visitors.
They may BE there when you show up at at lunch, but mostly they've BEEN there for hours already. I know, I've shown up at banks at 8am on a Monday and failed to get helped until after 1pm more than once.
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A car park with cars parked right next to each other will need to be defragged.
Please don't burst the bubbles of enthusiasts with reality..
Somebody utterly and completely failed to understand Darwin...
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Sounds to me like some local governments may be a wee bit worried that their local police won't be able to setup roadblocks and speedtraps to write out massive amounts of tickets to fill their coffers anymore? With self driving cars all going the speed limit and obeying all the traffic laws.... what will they do for money.
>Unless you are more than 100 years old, you have never lived during a time when there were no commercial airlines.
100 years is definitely "not that long ago". It is a merely 0.1% of RECORDED history, which is itself a mere 100th of a percent of the history of the human race, and that is still only about 1/4 of 1000th of a percent of the history of life.
Can I get the records from 90000 years ago please? (Yes, I am poking fun at your math mistake, and I do agree 100 years is not a long time.)
When I worked in a large Asian city where driving was not an option, I already had to get used to the change in shopping lifestyle. In this situation, the things you pick up on the way home are what you can carry. When you buy something large, you have it delivered. Even now, in rural northern Arizona, I would rather buy large bulky things on Amazon and have them whisked home by UPS.
A car park with cars parked right next to each other will need to be defragged.
No problem. We'll just create journalling parking systems.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
We have archeological records of human settlement at cape point 90k years ago. Technically I never said written records :p
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Just you wait until the governments realize their DMV functions are no longer required (or at least can be reduced to a tiny fraction of their current size). The buggy whip industry could never raise a similar stink, it just didn't have the numbers and the power and the unions.
You can't handle the truth.
I must not understand the definition of clog if our highways will be clogged with cars moving over 100mph. So the argument is the highways will be clogged because too many people use them but part of the reason they will use them is because they will be a faster, easier alternative to airplanes. Anyone else see a hole in that logic?
The first cars to be replaced by SDCs will be your urban commuteboxes. For a while, people will cling to the "weekend car" for hauling big things and for road trips. But given time, the cost savings of giving up car ownership will put SDCs in play for road trips too. When your land yacht breaks down in the sesert a thousand miles from home, you have an expensive mess on your hands. Hours waiting for the AAA to show up, being towed to a strange city where you hope you will be able to get help, a blown vacation.
Now think about what happens when your SDC breaks down in the desert. You fire up your app to contact the company, they send out a replacement, and your family is having burgers at Denny's while the car owner family is still trying to figure out how they will pay the huge bills.
Until the greedy owners figure it out and start charging $20 to park.
... and then another parking lot undercuts them by only charging $10, and then a bunch of homeowners undercut them by renting out space in their driveways for $5, and then ...
Right, and you see a lot of that undercutting today? No, and it will get worse with more vehicles, not better.
Just another day in Paradise
I think automated cars change the road dynamics enough to make that unclear. As traffic gets heavy, humans have to slow down because they need time and distance for their reactions. But if automated-only lanes are created, the computerized cars not only have reaction times two or three orders of magnitude faster than humans, but they can also coordinate via radio. That means that they can reduce following distances to near zero and increase speeds, which means that throughput for a given amount of road space increases dramatically.
Parent is correct. There were no commercial US flights on 9/12/2001, but the rest of the world still moved along.
...car owners will have their cars picking up and delivering people or goods to their destinations. You paid good money for that vehicle, why not have it earn some income for you while you're not using it?
If many or most other car owners are doing this, the money you get from renting your car out will likely be just a little more than it costs to operate the car. Your personal car will also have turned into a filthy cab, with countless strangers circulating through it adding wear to the upholstery and leaving their icky residue behind. It will, of course, be your job to clean up after these passengers, or you'll have to continually pay some other service to do a suboptimal job of cleaning it.
I wouldn't take $20 in exchange for having to clean up the soda that one passenger spilled all over the seats or ride home from dinner in a car that the previous passenger had just changed their baby's diaper in.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
With less oxygen than the atmosphere. Normal air is ~21% O2, and 0.04% CO2. Submarines routinely operate - without any health issues - with O2 levels at 15% and CO2 levels at 2.5%. Turns out that most places you go to have significantly higher CO2 levels than the normal atmosphere. And it doesn't seem to have negative impacts.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
SDCs are NOT going to be the end of buses and other mass transit vehicles. Instead, we will come to see cars and larger personal transit vehicles as being one system, vehicles we switch between as we continually make our own calculations of cost vs convenience. Once it becomes easy to figure out that a bus is on your commute home and stops a couple of blocks from your house, you will use it for commuting on ordinary days. When you have errands on the way home or have to work outside of bus hours, you will pay a little more and summon a car.
You can get most things delivered to your door by self-driving cars..
I think this is already getting close to optimized and isn't going to change much. I already get almost everything delivered to my door by a company that goes so far as to map its routes so there are fewer left turns to save fuel. Somebody still has to get out of the truck and deliver it to my porch. Some things are a lot less cost-effective to ship.
I can get fresh stuff delivered, too, but the limits on that aren't related to the vehicle so much as trusting who's picking them out or whether they'll have to sit out in the sun or where animals can get into them.
With SDC's even if congestion DOES remain a problem AND gets worse- it's no longer an issue. The time is no longer wasted. You can spend that time working, or reading a book, or watching a movie. The time you spend getting to and from work is no longer time you LOSE - it's time back for yourself to use however you wish. That is a MASSIVE gain for everybody.
See how well that works for buses and taxis.
Before you said you didn't live in a place with Uber - how did you have a shooting?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
What makes you think that you'd get bus-like prices for private transportation?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
As others have mentioned, self-driving only lanes will take care of most of the problem. That lane will be whipping along at 90+ with inches between each car.
Wishful thinking.
For one thing, autonomous cars can still have accidents - mechanical failure, a deer jumping onto the road, a rock fall - anything, really. So they need a safe distance between them, because stopping is not instantaneous, especially not with passengers who are fragile and can't handle 100G.
And that brings us over to problem #2: Passengers do not handle acceleration as well as drivers do. People are uncomfortable when being passengers in a car that accelerates and decelerates aggressively, even if they feel no such discomfort when driving themselves. This means that overall, the amount of time to get up to speed will go up, not down, as the number of single-person human-driven cars go down.
As of right now, all indications are that self driving cars will drive slower than human drivers, as well as accelerating and braking slower. All in the name of safety and comfort.
Ok, so, how am I going to be able to transport my boat...drop it in the lake, park with the trailer, so that I can pull my boat out at the launch and drive it back home and park it?
What do I use to haul my stuff to the camp site and set up? Usually camping is a bit remote, so you need your vehicle WITH you there.....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I was talking about Kalamazoo
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
We're talking about the primary service that people use... Now I have to pay for a 'premium' service just to shuffle my kids around?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Ah, but to the AC, if it occurs outside .us, it doesn't count. Kind of like that famous "New Yorker" cover. . .
Is there a statistical danger presented by Uber drivers, or are we just relying on your unique lack of selection bias?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The only statistic I have is one more mass shooter then taxis have had, in 1/10 the length of the industry.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Do you also want to own your own elevator? Nearly everyone considers an elevator to be a shared resource, yet some people want to own a car. Why is horizontal travel so different from vertical travel?
Because I don't make multiple stops on a horizontal errands run, and have the need to store what I've picked up along the way.
Just another day in Paradise
You can do what you do right now: drive your kids in manually. You can put them on the bus. You can call a cab. No one is taking options away from you. For those of us who would rather pay a little less and carpool, we get an option. It's good, it maximizes efficiency. Things that cause congestion cost more.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You won't own a SDC it will be a shared resource
Not in my lifetime. So many of you have failed to look at the huge variety of use case scenarios that would still make owning more attractive to many people. Sure, some folks will make the leap...many will not.
Just another day in Paradise
We should ban all occupations who have a single mass shooter among them. Food inspectors are clearly not safe, if San Bernardino has taught us anything.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
they're everywhere here in socal; starting to feel like the payphone wave because of the easy money. you can already drive from LA to vegas on pure electric with an hour to stretch your legs at a fast charge station in barstow. charging pitstop towns will probably flourish like route 66 towns once did.
I've made that trip numerous times. Why the hell would I want to take an hour long stop? Never needed one previously.
Just another day in Paradise
Unless you are more than 100 years old, you have never lived during a time when there were no commercial airlines.
If I didn't have access to commerical airlines growing up, then I'm 100 years old, the original statement is false, or the statement is overly simplicistic.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Obviously you'd have to choose a depth limit that balances space utilization with access efficiency. But it would still be dramatically more space-efficient than current parking lots.
Even better is if most of those cars are automated taxis, which only park because current demand is low enough that it's not cost-effective for them to be on the road. When demand picks up more cars need to be sent out... but it doesn't matter which ones, so you don't have to retrieve the one in the bottom of the stack.
The OP makes a good point, however, the evolution of self driving VEHICLES may be quite different from what is presently envisioned. Think instead of a vheilce the size of, say, a large dog, that can wtih a vrey salml energy footprint transport an urgently ndeeed pgakace to its destination. Think of delivery service clearinghouses that can group deliveries and routes. Think of cost savings for seniors care, and the elimination of their need for owning their own cars or requiring services of local support organizations. For entertainment value, read old issues of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines from the 1930's through the 1960's that offered predictions of what the future would be like. The ubiquity of future flying automobiles is one of my favorite failed prognostications. I also recall seeing a 35mm film put out by Union Carbide that showed the future of homes. One entire bedroom was occupied by the family's home computer. As for 100mph self driving automobiles, that is simple to prevent.
I mostly use busses and trains. It works great. And SDCs will be better because they are private and connected.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The car companies will know the approximate number of cars needed for each neighborhood, and when they will be needed.
I love how people always assume a perfectly efficient model that just springs up because it's in their best interest.
In reality, if it saves the cab companies $0.16 / hour they will have too few cars and you will be perpetually waiting, unless you are subscribed fast pass customer. Your fast pass will only be good in certain areas, you'll need multiple if your fastpass company doesn't think two seperate areas you frequent are worthwhile.
Cheap storage VM.
Wishful thinking. For one thing, autonomous cars can still have accidents - mechanical failure, a deer jumping onto the road, a rock fall - anything, really. So they need a safe distance between them, because stopping is not instantaneous, especially not with passengers who are fragile and can't handle 100G.
A "safe" distance between cars is defined by the reaction time of the driver, not the speed they are traveling. Nobody expects a driver to come to a complete stop in the distance available between two vehicles, just that they react quickly enough to not rear-end the vehicle in front. For autonomous cars traveling in a "pack" mode, the difference between the first car starting to brake and the last car also braking is going to be measured in small fractions of a second. Computer driven cars can also communicate how hard they are braking so they won't catch up to each other. So the vehicles can travel much closer together.
And that brings us over to problem #2: Passengers do not handle acceleration as well as drivers do. People are uncomfortable when being passengers in a car that accelerates and decelerates aggressively, even if they feel no such discomfort when driving themselves. This means that overall, the amount of time to get up to speed will go up, not down, as the number of single-person human-driven cars go down.
As of right now, all indications are that self driving cars will drive slower than human drivers, as well as accelerating and braking slower. All in the name of safety and comfort.
I agree that passengers want a gentle ride, however what time frame are you thinking about when you say "As of right now"? Six months? Six years? If you remove the need to sit upright and view the road ahead, there's no reason we can't lay down in seats that swivel with acceleration. If the seats can rotate so that the perceived acceleration is always "down", then you won't even spill your coffee under rapid acceleration. Time will tell and I'm looking forward to seeing what evolves.
For an SDC, the cost of waiting is near zero.
You might believe that, but it's almost certainly not true. What do you think is the most expensive part of owning a car? Gas. maintanence? insurance? No, it's depreciation. Depreciation is not a zero cost when your car is sitting doing nothing. Not to mention opportunity cost and other business costs.
Cheap storage VM.
Lol.. so now my child might be sitting alone in a car with another random passenger?
Yes? Why is this so shocking to Americans? In cities in Europe, children as young as 11 ride public transportation totally unsupervised, both to and from school and to activities. Subways, buses, trams, with multiple transfers, plus walking on city streets.
Why are Americans so afraid all the time?
Here's where real world collides with nerd world. I already park at a stadium every day. My employer pays for parking there or gets some sort of deal from the city.
There are frequently days when there is not enough parking because of some event. Stadiums need to use their parking, often.
Cheap storage VM.
Yeah, homeowners are going to be excited tying into some sort of corporate billing system that pays every 90 day (usually late) and requires a ream of paperwork.
Cheap storage VM.
Places with time limits in place of parking fees will fill up quickly, and every 2 hours or whatever the cars will reshuffle themselves.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Some asshole company (uber?) would program their cars to park in no parking spots and fire lanes. They would move if someone tried to ticket them or a fire truck is coming. They'd bribe someone to make it legal to use handicap spots because the can move easily (in theory). In reality the handicap person will have to call a call center somewhere in another country where they will wait forever to get the person on the other end to understand what they want, then a car near them will "move", but they won't be able to find the spot that was vacated.
Cheap storage VM.
A car park with cars parked right next to each other will need to be defragged
Nope, it won't. We'll just set it up as a (series of) FIFO stack(s).
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Some hick town not having an airport != You had no access to air travel.
Most people get to the airport by some other mode of transport. You could have gotten on the donkey, rode to the nearest train station then took the train the the big city.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Unless you are more than 100 years old, you have never lived during a time when there were no commercial airlines.
If I didn't have access to commerical airlines growing up, then I'm 100 years old, the original statement is false, or the statement is overly simplicistic.
Not having personal access to commercial airlines is not the same as not having commercial airlines. Using your reasoning, there are no nuclear weapons, either.
Obviously you'd have to choose a depth limit that balances space utilization with access efficiency. But it would still be dramatically more space-efficient than current parking lots.
Even better is if most of those cars are automated taxis, which only park because current demand is low enough that it's not cost-effective for them to be on the road. When demand picks up more cars need to be sent out... but it doesn't matter which ones, so you don't have to retrieve the one in the bottom of the stack.
Unless the taxis are solar powered or recharge via solar power, than there is still an additional carbon footprint for having them just drive about aimlessly waiting to be summoned. However, what you describe is one of the predictions of a future uber system that will have the potential to replace taxis as we know them, today.
An algorithm to predict demand?
You realize that shoppers moving through a mall is a chaotic system? Sit by a mall entrance and watch the traffic. It's more like weather than a steady flow. Single stores are less chaotic.
You need a 'taxi line' for that situation. Even then, it will occasionally get depleted. It's an easy problem to solve, so long as you don't expect to get 100% car utilization.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
They would move if someone tried to ticket them or a fire truck is coming.
Then what's the problem in the latter case? The idea with firelanes is to allow fire trucks access. If the cars are smart enough to give the fire trucks access if necessary, we no longer need to waste the space the other 99.9% of the time.
In the prior, well, the ticket agent can often just block the car in so it can't safely move out of the way. Or even just get a picture of the plates and fill out the rest of the paperwork to mail to the registered owner.
They'd bribe someone to make it legal to use handicap spots because the can move easily (in theory).
Again, parking ticket authority stops behind the vehicle, it's not moving. Bribing others for their handicapped stickers? That would trip conspiracy and RICO charges, I think. Too dangerous.
In whole, I find your ideas to be wild speculation.
I don't read AC A human right
The only statistic I have is one more mass shooter then taxis have had, in 1/10 the length of the industry.
Here's what a 30-second Google search turned up on murderous cab drivers.
http://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/west-phoenix/pd-man-shot-at-west-phoenix-gas-station
http://www.wsvn.com/story/28813868/taxi-driver-charged-in-miami-shooting
https://www.policeone.com/investigations/articles/6134656-Motive-unknown-for-cab-driver-who-shot-cop-in-head/
http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2015/07/cab_driver_tells_police_he_sho.html
I think this is already getting close to optimized and isn't going to change much. I already get almost everything delivered to my door by a company that goes so far as to map its routes so there are fewer left turns to save fuel. Somebody still has to get out of the truck and deliver it to my porch.
Maybe. I envision future UPS trucks as mobile delivery-drone base stations. There may be a person in the truck sorting packages and managing the drones while the truck drives the route, launching and recovering drones while in motion. I think one large truck could replace several of the size currently used.
Hmmm.
Ok, so, how am I going to be able to transport my boat...drop it in the lake, park with the trailer, so that I can pull my boat out at the launch and drive it back home and park it?
What do I use to haul my stuff to the camp site and set up? Usually camping is a bit remote, so you need your vehicle WITH you there.....
In that case you rent the vehicle for the week (or whatever). Or maybe this will be one of the exceptional cases that encourages personal ownership. I own a pickup truck for exactly the purposes you mention, and I've debated whether I actually use it enough to justify owning it. It might be more cost-effective to just rent a truck when I need it. Well, this summer I'm hoping to go to the lake two or three days per week, hauling the boat back and forth each time, and if I do that then owning will clearly be better than renting... unless I rented a slip on the water and just left the boat there. That's expensive, but less than my monthly truck payment.
The airlines have only themselves, their own greed, and their utter rolling over for the TSA to blame for making air travel so overpriced and unpleasant that people will avoid it whenever possible.
The physics of trains isn't obvious.
Train cars need to be _heavy_, even when empty. Or they pull off the tracks accelerating/climbing around corners while moving slowly. Less of an issue with a shorter train or with drive motors in every car.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You shouldn't base your worldview on fairy tales.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Car insurance liability is unlimited in the UK and I believe most of Europe. It's still affordable, unless you are under 25 in which case it is insane for other reasons.
Last person I spoke to about it mentioned $1M(well Euro), in Germany, but he was a professional driver of some stripe.
Also, manufacturers won't accept liability after the first few years of high price vehicles being on the market. Once insurance companies are satisfied that they are safe, cheaper models will require the owner to insure them as normal.
I'm hesitant to say that they'd do this. You see, at least in the USA it's technically the driver of the vehicle that's liable, not the owner. Who's the driver of a self-driving car? I'd see the owner of a vehicle being required to purchase 'full coverage' - but the creator of the self-driving system to be liable for accidents caused by the system. Which is typically the most expensive part of the insurance, so insurance rates for self-driving cars should drop substantially.
I'm kind of shocked that you can get a policy that only covers the other party for $300k. That's not even enough for one person's medical bills, let along if you hit a bus...
You want crazy? There are states where, except that insurance companies won't write them, the statutory requirement is only $10k. "Underinsured" insurance is a thing - what that does is bring your insurance in to cover you if you're hit by somebody else and their insurance/money runs out. So let's say I'm hit by somebody with a 100/300 policy - $100k per individual, $300k per incident. My policy is $250k/$500k. My insurance would pick up the extra $150k for myself. After that my healthcare insurance would pick up(and it's unlimited).
Hitting a bus with a normal vehicle isn't actually all that likely to cost that much to other people... Most buses are built high and heavy enough that you're not getting into their passenger compartment unless you're in a commercial class vehicle yourself, in which cases the required insurance levels are generally higher.
I don't read AC A human right
No... People being stupid and crashing into other people will clog our Highways.
Whenever a player quits EVE to go play WoW, the Average IQ of both games increase.
All we are talking about is whether an occupation is worthy of being made more safe by proper vetting.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Why would you need to stop? I've driven Badwater Basin to SFO with a single stop in Gilroy (450 miles between Badwater and Gilroy) because both the car and a passenger were running hungry. And comparable distances along other places on the west coast. If you adjust the driver seat and the wheel for a proper driving position according to your weight, height and arm length you can drive 450+ miles in one go without being inconvenienced by compressed bladder, overstretched erector muscles, compressed diaphragm or over exerted neck muscles. And let me tell you, the majority of American drivers aren't driving in a proper driving position, they are setting their seats to something like half laid down on the couch in front of the TV position. It may be comfortable for the first 5 minutes, but it kills them for a drive over 3 hours. Also, don't blast the AC in the car all the way down, as most Americans do, keep it at 78 in the summer, or 68-70 in the winter with the seat heaters on low or medium and get rid of the heavy clothing, use thermal base layer for skiing or winter sports and a light t-shirt.
Because no one wants to be that one? As protective as Americans are, there are twice as many child abductions here. We both get around 250,000 per year but Europe is roughly twice the population. I get leaflets about child molesters that live in our area all the time.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
In the UK you can already get your groceries delivered, including outside rush hour, for around 12 USD per month.
Per month? That can't be daily delivery. One grocery store in my town delivers but it's something like $5-$10 per order.
So we can expect it to be at least as bad with ride sharing.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You would need to show that (a) there is a statistically significant problem worth solving and (b) that the regular taxi vetting process would help with a problem that has been identified. If we ignore significance, then we are crafting policy based on human hunches. If those were satisfactory, we would not need science.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Usually camping is a bit remote, so you need your vehicle WITH you there.....
Why? Shouldn't you just be able to drop off your luggage pods after you reach your destination and not need the vehicle again until your planned departure time?
Also, the boat thing is no different, really.
I would call this an exceptional situation.... probably not exactly covered with the standard short-term "Get from place A to point B" arrangement, since you're going offroad, which is not a covered situation by the typical auto insurance plan, without declaring that the vehicle will also be used offroad.
I agree entirely. I suspect the original article was posted by the steering wheel lobby, or some such.
If you remove the need to sit upright and view the road ahead, there's no reason we can't lay down in seats that swivel with acceleration.
Well, yeah, there is: car sickness.
Component failures still do happen. A blown out tire just requires the car behind it to stay at a distance, otherwise you have an expensive cleanup to do. Much more so with a 3" between bumpers electric cars. That can only be allowed if there is a hard coupling.
Either way, it is likely that it will be driving for a large amount of time relative to the stop whether it is driving to the outskirts for a spot or circling around looking for one suitable.
How long/far does it take to get out of the central core of the city?
In my experience, it generally takes very little time. I mean, 10 miles and you're generally out of even NYC.
I don't read AC A human right
Are we assuming that an automated car will be able parallel park in any space that a human could?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
SDCs aren't inherently that much better than HDCs as far as congestion goes. The problem lies in the fact that we fuck ourselves with traffic jams, so-to-speak. Improper zipper merges, people not wanting to let others in, constant lane changes trying to "get ahead" by a tiny distance, a small gap opens so people floor it to prevent others from moving in and then having to brake heavily, etc. All of that is what causes traffic jams. If everyone chilled the fuck out, were more courteous, and maintained a safe distance, you wouldn't have nearly as big of a problem.
Unless they make them go a lot faster (including breaking the speed limit), then yes, they will clog up the roads. Slow cars get in the way!
Best drug courier ever!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I'm not worried about getting stranded where there is cellphone reception. Worried about getting stranded where I'm looking at ham radio or sat based communications. I doubt the fleet cars will be putting in sat uplinks.
You might be surprised. The other issue is that they might just end up extending cell phone coverage over those areas, and keep in mind that the range of a car based cellular antenna can be a lot larger than for a handheld. Better position and more power behind it...
I don't read AC A human right
Now think about what happens when your SDC breaks down in the desert. You fire up your app to contact the company, they send out a replacement, and your family is having burgers at Denny's while the car owner family is still trying to figure out how they will pay the huge bills.
That rather depends on what broke down, doesn't it? But yeah, a broken vehicle can easily ruin a vacation. If you're renting your vehicle, then it's the rental company's hassle and expense.
I don't read AC A human right
That depends on the stadium, now doesn't it? I know of stadiums that are in use 2 days a month during a 6 month season and is otherwise empty.
It was just an example.
I don't read AC A human right
To be clear, your fear isn't Uber, then, it's any service where someone else drives you?
Are we assuming that an automated car will be able parallel park in any space that a human could?
I don't see why not. Have you ever seen the videos of humans wildly failing to parallel park? Did you know that luxury cars are already coming with the ability to parallel park themselves?
Human fail:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Computer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't read AC A human right
The safe distance in question is not two seconds, though, it's more like two feet. All you need is enough time for the radar of the car behind to recognize the sudden deceleration and to brake. Unless the sudden deceleration is greater than the car behind can brake, you're fine, you only need a millisecond or two of following distance. Two feet gives us about 15 milliseconds, which is a twentieth of an eyeblink for a human, but a very long time for a computer. As for the vehicles further back, they will not only be able to see the deceleration of the vehicle in front of them, but they can be notified by radio so essentially the whole following train slows together (though there are some interesting security challenges in preventing spoofing; cryptographically it's easy, but the key management will be tough).
And if the car behind can't brake hard enough to avoid a collision (which is pretty unlikely), the fact that the entire train behind can brake essentially simultaneously means that none of them will hit any harder than the first follower, and those feet will quickly add up to car lengths, so they won't stack up very far back.
Well, if the AI is going to park like the humans whom you think are representative, then it will need to drive to the outskirts of the city to a standardized lot. 20-30 minutes one way depending on traffic. Better hope its not rush hour or your eating dinner out.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The point was that you can make a similarly alarming and plausible statement about any technological advancement/updated product from the past. Some of them will be true and some of them won't. Not only can you not necessarily tell from the speculation what's going to occur (without hindsight bias), but the actual results overall aren't the disaster implied in the format of the statement.
Would the general population prefer life without them? Did society come to an end as a result of the creative destruction inherent in the process? No to both.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
No, I was saying that they're better at parallel parking than humans. Well except for the crazy Chinese who were drifting into parking spots in Minis.
That was a contest though.
I don't read AC A human right
You talk about cities charging for congestion like that is a desirable outcome.
I have no position on whether it's desirable or not -- I only remark that it can be done, and if it is seen as necessary to keep people from abusing the roads by turning them into de-facto parking lots, then it probably will be done.
First of all it's going to be a long time before cities are technologically advanced enough to do that
Given that every self-driving car has GPS, a network connection, and software, the technology to do that is available right now. It would just be a matter of passing a law to force the self-driving car manufacturers to implement it. (yes, I know, ill be the end of American freedom and all that. Again, I'm not advocating this, just predicting it)
if that is what autonomous cars are going to bring on then I'll stick with the manual solution.
You can stick to whatever you want, it won't make a difference to what everybody else does.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No.
Think clearly. People will not need individual cars if a shared car can drive between houses as needed. My concern about shared driving is that there will be no shared car in my area when needed. With self driving cars, that problem will be gone. Thus less people will need a personal car.
Owning a car is a real pain that I would prefer not to do.
I agree, but I don't think I should force others to not own a car if they so chose.
With SDCs you won't own it, you will request a vehicle that is suitable for the journey so for commutes it will be a small single user vehicle,
So the Robot Uber company has to own 5 times as many vehicles now, all in different sizes, and have them close by just in case a user changes their mind?
I don't think you've thought that through.
Oh and we already have single user vehicles, they're called scooters. And even in countries that have scooter as the dominate form of personal transport, they still have congestion.
Actually - if you get your head out of your ass you would realize that is a nett INCREASE in freedom.
So by freedom you mean you choose what's good for the rest of us?
Cool story bro.
With SDC's even if congestion DOES remain a problem AND gets worse- it's no longer an issue. The time is no longer wasted. You can spend that time working,
So you solution is we all get stuck in traffic longer, but it's ok because you can read?
I have a better solution, more buses and trains. You also get to read but you also get less traffic. Win, win.
Because a large chunk of the cost is labour, which is no longer incurred.
So. Much. Stupid.
When more people are able to do something than before more people are more free. Unless you are unable to count.
Besides nobody is going to force the change. No law will ban human driving just like no law banned horses. But, like horses, human driven cars will become a toy for crazy rich people. There can be no reduction in anybodies liberty without force. The call a car zervices will simply be able to offer you a far cheaper way to meet transport needs thus freeing up more of your money and giving you the increased freedom of actually having a choice in what you spend it on.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
but the actual results overall aren't the disaster implied in the format of the statement.
I don't think any disaster was implied. Clogged highways are a fact of life for most, and more cars doesn't solve that. No disaster, just points worth discussing.
Lol.. so now my child might be sitting alone in a car with another random passenger?
No. Is that how taxis work for you now?
This gets better and better.
Only if you haven't thought it through
Soooo, you should probably not hire that service then. Failing to see the problem.
Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
You can do what you do right now: drive your kids in manually. You can put them on the bus. You can call a cab. No one is taking options away from you.
But for every person doesn't think about such things, it does impact me, because if I want to drive like now, I now have to contend with more vehicles on the same sized roads.
Robot cars will not solve the problem of congestion in major cities, so stop pretending that they will.
Yes, but those cars will be driving for less than 1/4th the time it would take you to normally commute, so it evens out, surely. Unless you are saying that each journey would take the same amount of time as all 4 journeys together?
I don't think anyone is saying that you won't be able to own a car. I'm sure that many people will. However you won't have to own a car. SDCs will open up the personal transportation market.
A network connection? No one is going to want a car that is connected to anything. I certainly don't.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Assuming they park like an average human and allowing for all the other people in the core that will also be sending their vehicles to the suburbs to park, the car will have to drive around 20 mins away to find a spot. Which means if you're stopping for an hour the car will have to drive for a better portion of that hour in order to be parked. Not to mention adding to the congestion getting out of the core area.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Besides nobody is going to... No law will... human driven cars will become.. There can be no....car zervices will... .
Righto. Can you also tell me next week's lottery numbers?
Yes, but those cars will be driving for less than 1/4th the time it would take you to normally commute, so it evens out, surely. Er, the argument is that robot cars will be so awesome, no-one will need to own a car or take a bus, Robot uber would be much cheaper, and door to door service, so people would just use them instead.
So based on this assumption, Many more people choose Robot Uber, hence more cars on the road (and less full buses and trains).
Unless you are saying that each journey would take the same amount of time as all 4 journeys together?
Different people travel at different times. So the 4x 30 minute trips are still 4x 30 minute trips. Except instead of 3 of those people on 3 buses that takes up the space of about 8 cars, there are now 300 more robot cars on the streets (our buses have a 100 person capacity).
Comparing educated extrapolations of the most predictable things in the world with predictions of truly random events.
I think you judt committed the most egregious false equivalency fallacy since Aristotle invented the concept of fallacies.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I don't think anyone is saying that you won't be able to own a car.
The robot car fan boys are envisaging some robot car utopia where cars behave like a perfectly configured IP network. As someone who's made a living out fixing poorly configured networks, you'll excuse me if I'm a little cynical.
No, I think you are wrong. Robot cars allow better correlation between activities which cause congestion and cost. Right now, your private car has a driver cost of zero because you don't count your own time. You don't consider the cost of the car on each trip because it is already a sunk cost, and psychologically you don't see the cost of a few more miles on your private car. With robot cars, rides with more passengers will be cheaper. A ride to the local park-n-ride will be cheaper (and no parking fee!) than a ride into the downtown. A direct economic incentive like this will surely reduce congestion. And with detailed trip logs, road planning and taxing can be made far fairer and more effective.
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No, that's exactly what it means. There is no problem. A service is offered that he does not take advantage of. No harm, no foul. There is no problem with lamb being offered at the grocery store even if you personally hate lamb.
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Labor is reduced, sure. But all things being equal, a car with more passengers offers a larger return on invested capital than a car with fewer passengers. The self-driving carpool service will always be cheaper than the self-driving single-passenger service.
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They also forget to mention the additional 30,000 people on the roads each year, due to not having died to road accidents.
A network connection? No one is going to want a car that is connected to anything. I certainly don't.
Someone ought to tell Tesla that. All current Teslas communicate via the cell network, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their sales any.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Assuming they park like an average human
Actually, figure that they're better at parking than the average human.
the car will have to drive around 20 mins away to find a spot.
That's "center of NYC" type timing. Don't forget that they can increase capacity by closing margins. That being said, automated taxis might help matters by being available to pick up a passenger once they drop one off.
After that, I'd boost pedestrian and biking options. I've proposed before having skywalks between buildings that have airport style slideways. The spread of small skateboard sized battery operated vehicles might change that up, but the goal was to double the average walking speed, doubling the range people can cover on foot. That would quadruple, on average, the 'walk zone' of the average person. With more places accessible on foot, they'd tend to walk more, and with walking more they'd be fitter, which would lead to an even bigger walk zone, while substantially reducing the need for vehicles.
I don't read AC A human right
Until they're challenging mainstream automakers it's hard to tell how hurt their sales are.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Can't a string of cars go 100 miles an hour, each separated by 4 feet? Seems like congestion would go away as you take away human control..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Right, there aren't any nuclear weapons in my home town. (that I know of)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You think human behavior, AI and traffic are "the most predictable things in the world". And you're calling me stupid?
A ride to the local park-n-ride will be cheaper (and no parking fee!) than a ride into the downtown. A direct economic incentive like this will surely reduce congestion.
Ok, let's break this down a bit. If robot rides are cheaper, more people will use them right?
More people means more vehicles.
More vehicles means more congestion.
Robot AI may improve traffic flow a little, but since most major city roads are already past capacity at peak hour, no amount of maths solves this. And the added vehicles counter any efficiency gain.
You either need more roads (no-one wants that in their neighbourhood), or more people per vehicle (we already have that solution, it's called buses and trains - and the majority of people won't feel comfortable sharing a small car with strangers)
In summary, the solution is not robot cars, although robot uber might play a part, but robot buses and trains. And with detailed trip logs, road planning and taxing can be made far fairer and more effective.
No, that's exactly what it means. There is no problem. A service is offered that he does not take advantage of. No harm, no foul. There is no problem with lamb being offered at the grocery store even if you personally hate lamb.
But there are laws about drugs, guns, sex, and yes many, many laws about traffic behaviour, including what types of vehicles are allowed where and when because of their impact to congestion.
Just because you don't believe it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Ok, sharing cars with strangers is a service now, and almost no-one uses it. So we know that doesn't work
The most realistic model for robot cars is the same as now, roughly one person per vehicle. Under that model, vehicle numbers will increase, this causing congestion to increase.
>You think human behavior
There is literally nothing in the world more easily predicted. Indeed, there are a huge number of careers (most of them in fact) that depend entirely on the fact that the fact that this is so easy to predict. At the most obvious level everybody from stage magicians to conmen make their living this way, but so do all marketers, salesmen and basically every business in the world. The only difference is one of skill, predicting it in aggregate is much easier - so everybody does that (and most people do it well enough to survive), predicting a particular individual is harder but equally possible, so only a select few people can manage that. That's why there are fewer conmen and stage magicians than there are advertising agents. But they all do the same job - accurately predict people's responses to a given set of circumstances and incentives and then exploit that predictability.
We all believe that our own behavior cannot possibly be predictable, it's an illusion. In fact, even your claim that it is "stupid" to think this is a predictable thing was entirely predictable - when I wrote it I knew what your reply would be, and started preparing this response.
People respond to incentives. If you create incentives that reward cheating, almost everybody cheats. When a new technology offers massive cost advantages over the existing, almost everybody switches. You don't need to predict the few outliers to succeed because there is never enough of them to be statistically significant - and even they are entirely predictable if you have personal data on them - that's the level where the conmen operate, they study the individual, learn all about you (from very little data) and suddenly people are impressed by the psychic's apparent ability to know the unknowable. Look up "cold reading" and "leading questions" - learn how easy it is to find out all the key indicators that will predict EXACTLY what incentives would sway your behavior, exactly what wording will fool you and win your trust, exactly what your biasses are and how to exploit them.
If this was hard, or impossible, conmen would not exist at all. Contrary to popular opinion, conmen rarely pray on the stupid - the stupid doesn't have money. Conmen PREFER smart people because smart people have more to take and they are no harder to con - you just have to find the right levers, in many ways they are actually the EASIEST to con - because they assume they are too smart to BE conned.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I still don't see people who formerly took a bus or some other form of mass transit suddenly abandoning that for a more expensive option. I can see people using the robotic cars to get to a transportation hub.
But this is all mental masturbation. If these things cause congestion, we fix it by changing the costs. Easy. The technology itself is just a tool and does not present problems by itself.
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Congestion? I was replying to someone who didn't want their kid to ride with strangers. I told him not to use the sharing service.
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In summary, the solution is not robot cars, although robot uber might play a part, but robot buses and trains. And with detailed trip logs, road planning and taxing can be made far fairer and more effective.
I suspect we are talking past one another a bit. Automatic trains and buses will absolutely be valuable. I can't imagine that self-driving cars will be a thing, but not trains - the problem is much, much simpler to solve. In New York, roughly 36% of the transit budget is salaries. Not all drivers, but nonetheless there is a lot of cost to be saved with automation of buses and trains.
It might even be that it only pays to operate the mass transit stuff during peak hours, while renting the more efficient small vehicles when there are few passengers. I've been on many a late-night empty subway train or city bus. Incredibly inefficient. At 2AM it might be more cost-effective for the transit service to contract for some self-driving cars.
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There is literally nothing in the world more easily predicted.
I don't think you understand what the word literally means. Or the basics of probability. And you're calling me stupid?
I still don't see people who formerly took a bus or some other form of mass transit suddenly abandoning that for a more expensive option.
Some will, some won't. And for every person that does it's one more car required on the road, which adds to congestion.
I can see people using the robotic cars to get to a transportation hub.
If we have robot cars, we can have robot buses that extend services closer to each street, so there's no need for car. Walk/bus or walk/train is the most efficient option that exists
But this is all mental masturbation. If these things cause congestion, we fix it by changing the costs. Easy.
Eh what? Just change costs? Good luck getting that one across the next election
The technology itself is just a tool and does not present problems by itself.
Yes it does. If your tool solves one problem but then creates another, that is a problem.
Eh what? Just change costs? Good luck getting that one across the next election
No harder than figuring out how to legalize and regulate the autonomous cars themselves.
If your tool solves one problem but then creates another, that is a problem.
It can't create a problem merely by existing. These things operate on public roads, which means you have all the usually public policy tools at your disposal. If your vision of the future is the correct one and people flock to self-driving cars creating traffic nightmares, this is something that can be attacked using existing tools, and new tools if need be. But that's a big "if".
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Automatic trains and buses will absolutely be valuable. I can't imagine that self-driving cars will be a thing, but not trains - the problem is much, much simpler to solve.
You would think that, but robot trains already exist but are not permitted to run fully automatically because of safety issues (in my country we have robot trains that have a "driver", who is really just an "observer/safety officer".
Given this information, if robot trains are not allowed to be fully automated, do you really think in this legal/risk averse climate, that robot cars will be?
No harder than figuring out how to legalize and regulate the autonomous cars themselves.
Exactly my point. It's politically hard, extremely difficult even, yet a lot of comments in here speak as if it's a given.
Robot cars are not just a technology problem.
If your vision of the future is the correct one and people flock to self-driving cars creating traffic nightmares, this is something that can be attacked using existing tools, and new tools if need be. But that's a big "if".
It's quite a small if actually. Urban traffic modelling is well understood, and in large cities the only transport solution that scales is trains, and to a lesser extent buses.
The average road lane carries bout 2000 people per hour (on average), while the highest capacity rail lines carry up to 80000 people per hour. No amount of robot car AI is getting anywhere near that level of capacity, so it doesn't actually solve the key issues facing urban transport, ie capacity and scale.
Literally according to the dictionary can mean two things - the meaning you grammar nazi's always complain isn't valid, is one of the meanings. But in this case, I was actually using the first meaning, it really is the easiest thing in the world to predict. It takes rather more effort when tossing a ball into the air to predict where it will land. In both cases it's easy enough that those who learn how can do it without even being aware that they are doing it, completely subconsciously, but the math that's being subconsciously done for the ball is far more complicated.
You don't need probability to predict human behaviour. Basic biology will suffice.
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You don't need probability to predict human behaviour. Basic biology will suffice.
What did I have for breakfast, what time and where did I eat it?
And you're calling me stupid?
I said it can be done with enough input data. I never said I could do it for a random person on the internet.
And for the predictions I made here, I have the input data. The likely economic differences between a car and an SDC. All I need to know to predict the behaviour of people in this regard is "hungry people look for food".
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No amount of robot car AI is getting anywhere near that level of capacity
I assume you mean robot car AI? Because automatic mass transit already exists.
I would seriously doubt that statistical models can cope with a transition from car ownership to on-demand car rental services, but I welcome the opportunity to be enlightened. It's almost as if a new gas were introduced and asking existing climate models to deal with it.
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in my country we have robot trains that have a "driver", who is really just an "observer/safety officer".
I think this is just temporary - or as in Washington, DC a reflection on the crappiness of the automation. In Singapore they operate fully automated trains.
do you really think in this legal/risk averse climate, that robot cars will be?
I think that is the greatest risk to the technology. But again, temporary. The cool thing about having 50 states is that you figure at least one crazy state will go all-in. Then you start to get data and if the automatons are better than human drivers, the others will follow. The feds, as usual, will only step in once there is a bandwagon to jump on.
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I assume you mean robot car AI? Because automatic mass transit already exists.
Er yeah, that's my argument. This thread is about how robot cars will make life better, which TFA and me have presented counter arguments to.
I would seriously doubt that statistical models can cope with a transition from car ownership to on-demand car rental services,
There's no stats required. A car is fixed size, so you know the upper limit of cars that that fit on a road at any given time.
I think this is just temporary - or as in Washington, DC a reflection on the crappiness of the automation. In Singapore they operate fully automated trains.
I used to live in Singapore. They have some automated trains, but not all. And the reason they and others don't is because of safety concerns. A fully isolated train line, ie in a tunnel or overhead track can be fully controlled. A line on ground level doesn't offer the same assurances, hence the requirement for an "observer".
I'm pretty sure it's just an age thing. I remember they were concerned about safety, but in the end the newer trains ended up being automated. The lines from the 80s are not. Trains don't exactly stop on a dime, so if someone jumps on the tracks or a car blocks a crossing, there's not much to be done by an engineer anyway. Most (as in the vast majority) of the deaths by train now are trespassing/suicides and grade-level crossings despite having a human at the controls.
Where is the ground-level track in Singapore? I haven't been there in probably 10 years, but I don't remember seeing anything except subways and elevated tracks.
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There's no stats required. A car is fixed size, so you know the upper limit of cars that that fit on a road at any given time.
I completely disagree. This is such a complex system that you cannot hope to model the effects in your head. Even the issue of the capacity of roads is in play once automation kicks in. Speed, lane width, following distance, utilization of secondary roads, routing and scheduling, people's habits and expectations - everything is in play.
Most importantly, population is increasing. Urbanization is increasing. The number of cars on the road is increasing. Housing developments are being built in the 'burbs. Thus traffic is going to be worse one way or another.
Let's put this another way - where is there an example of computers applied to a problem which made the overall system worse? Why would transportation be such an exception?
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I'm pretty sure it's just an age thing. I remember they were concerned about safety, but in the end the newer trains ended up being automated. The lines from the 80s are not.
It's a risk thing. Newer lines can be built to avoid higher risk incidents by building in all the things you need to mitigate the risks, but since most train systems were established over 100 years ago, it's not feasible to implement the same measures everywhere.
Trains don't exactly stop on a dime, so if someone jumps on the tracks or a car blocks a crossing, there's not much to be done by an engineer anyway. Most (as in the vast majority) of the deaths by train now are trespassing/suicides and grade-level crossings despite having a human at the controls.
Yes and the train stops, everyone gets off, and the clean up crew is brought in. Under your system the splayed remains of a victim will remain all over the train and just continue service as normal? I can't see any public official signing off on that possible scenario.
Where is the ground-level track in Singapore? I haven't been there in probably 10 years, but I don't remember seeing anything except subways and elevated tracks.
I was only offering that as a example of why some trains get automated while others don't. The reasons are risk based rather than age.
I completely disagree. This is such a complex system that you cannot hope to model the effects in your head.
Of course you can, just like this:
A car is roughly 5m in length
For every 1 km of lane, you can only fit a maximum of 200 cars (200x5). That is a hard upper limit that no amount of automation changes.
The only variable is speed, which works out to 1 additional car per second at 5 m/s, 2 at 10m/s, 5 at 25m/s etc.
So on you local suburban street, even at twice the current speed limit (say 100km/h ie 28m/s), 5 cars every second, or say 18000 cars per hour.
That is a theoretical upper limit that no amount of automation can improve on.
Now back to reality, 100km/h is completely unrealistic, and in my city, the average speed of major arterial roads is somewhere closer to 20km/h (5.6m/s).
So 3600 cars per hour maximum (assuming there is zero space between vehicles). And guess what? The actual average car per lane is somewhere around 2000.
So even in your perfect universe, you are nowhere near the 80000 people per hour the best subway trains are moving.
If you want scale, Trains are the only solution that works.
Most importantly, population is increasing. Urbanization is increasing. The number of cars on the road is increasing. Housing developments are being built in the 'burbs. Thus traffic is going to be worse one way or another.
Only if your town planners don't understand the value of trains.
Let's put this another way - where is there an example of computers applied to a problem which made the overall system worse? Why would transportation be such an exception?
There's plenty of examples where people tried to throw technology at a problem just because technology!
One that comes to mind right now is my Smart TV, which is absolutely shit and works worse then my regular TV because it's always trying to do updates, or contact a server which it can't find and popping up a note on screen while I'm trying to watch TV.
So sure technology can help, but it's not the automatic answer for every problem in the universe.
So even in your perfect universe, you are nowhere near the 80000 people per hour the best subway trains are moving.
Well, you certainly win the argument I wasn't making! I never said cars were capable of the same throughput as mass transit.
If you want scale, Trains are the only solution that works.
I agree, are you sure you are replying to the right guy? I'm not making any sort of counter argument. I was simply defending the invention of automated cars as being more efficient than non-automated cars. That's better, no matter how you try to imagine that it will make your life worse.
One that comes to mind right now is my Smart TV, which is absolutely shit and works worse then my regular TV because it's always trying to do updates, or contact a server which it can't find and popping up a note on screen while I'm trying to watch TV.
That's an example of a shitty product, not an example of where a technology made an overall system worse. Technology has improved television incredibly, by any measure. The TVs are higher resolution, lighter, flatter, larger, consume less energy, instantly turn on (except for your crappy one), can do 3d, have a bazillion channels plus any video on the internet - the change from when I was born in the 70s to now is staggering. And yes, they can run computer applications - if in your case poorly. They still are far more powerful than even a supercomputer in the 80s - even your crappy one.
So sure technology can help, but it's not the automatic answer for every problem in the universe.
But it is the answer to almost every problem that humans have in dealing with limited resources. More efficient cars can only help.
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I was only offering that as a example of why some trains get automated while others don't. The reasons are risk based rather than age.
No, not in Singapore I don't think. The technology when they first put in the MRT in the 80s wasn't up to the task. The new lines and old lines are similar infrastructure-wise. All the tracks are either elevated or in tunnels. The tunnel stations all have double doors to keep air conditioning in, but they have the secondary benefit of keeping people off of the tracks. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually update the older systems to run fully automated. Even DC has a mostly-auto mode - but of the shitty 80s variety and it is unreliable... though to be fair that is partly due to neglect.
As to your suggestion that the train would keep moving if someone got hit, I presume that someone would hit the e-stop button. Or, for less than the cost of an engineer you could hire a security guard or even full-blown cop to babysit. Sensors could also be employed to keep an eye out for obstructions or collisions. An automated train is a far, far easier problem than an automated car.
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Well, you certainly win the argument I wasn't making! I never said cars were capable of the same throughput as mass transit.
The topic is "Will Self-Driving Cars Clog Our Highways?" and your comments were based around how much more convenient robot cars will be. I think they are related as the convenience is dependent on congestion, which robot card will contribute a net gain towards.
I was simply defending the invention of automated cars as being more efficient than non-automated cars. That's better, no matter how you try to imagine that it will make your life worse.
No it isn't. Because if making it "better", means more people use it, therefore cause congestion growth, so makes it less better overall, it is a net loss.
That's an example of a shitty product, not an example of where a technology made an overall system worse.
So who's to say if robot cars are great or shitty? The only true test to predicting the future is time. Simply saying it's technology therefore it will be great is inaccurate.
But it is the answer to almost every problem that humans have in dealing with limited resources.
Yes applied correctly, not just to your pet gadget.
More efficient cars can only help.
More efficient transport can only help.
That is subtle but important difference.
Or, for less than the cost of an engineer you could hire a security guard or even full-blown cop to babysit.
Which is what most automated trains have now. The driver doesn't actually drive, they observe and act should an unexpected scenario occur.
An automated train is a far, far easier problem than an automated car.
My point exactly. If an automated train is easy, yet still needs a human safety observer, what make you think the same risk assessors will allow a robot car onto a public street unrestricted?
what make you think the same risk assessors will allow a robot car onto a public street unrestricted?
They won't today. They will once the preponderance of evidence shows that humans are not as safe as robots, or at worst when humans cause more problems throwing the e-switch than robots cause without it.
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which robot card will contribute a net gain towards.
They might, or they might help. You can't possibly work out the complexities of this in your head and neither can I. Congestion is a problem now, and I doubt it will cease to be a problem. Policy will need to keep up with technology.
As a counter point, though, I will point to a recent deal between SEPTA (our regional mass transit agency) and Uber where they offer 40% off rides to and from regional rail centers with insufficient parking. If this is successful, it will alleviate congestion. Robot cars could do this even more cheaply, making mass transit into the city viable for those who currently live too far from a station. It doesn't help me - I live very close to a station. It should increase traffic through my neighborhood, but each of those cars is one that is not clogging the roads of Philly.
it is a net loss.
A more efficient tool is never a net loss. If we have better tools and use them in a stupid way, that's on us. It's still better to have the improved tool.
Simply saying it's technology therefore it will be great is inaccurate.
I completely agree. It might turn out to be too complex of a problem for machines to take on. It certainly is right now. I thought we were having a conversation as if robot cars were inevitable, but it is certainly possible that the marketers are pulling the wool over our eyes.
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