What Happens to American Myth When You Take the Driver Out of It?
nymag.com
nymag.com
In practice, many of the cities with the highest housing costs are now strongly anti-infrastructure and anti-transport anytime it involves cars. (What good is a self-driving car if it's getting stuck in the same-or-larger traffic jam everyday?). Cities like this problem because it adds to the inflation of their own property values, and they get to pretend they are being "greener" or "safer" (even though self-driving EV cars eliminate the majority of those issues).
So I suspect that in practice, self-driving cars won't lower housing costs much in most major markets. It could help smaller cities, but they already struggle less with housing costs in the first place.
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The biggest changes will probably be felt elsewhere. Such as by professional drivers (school/city bus drivers, truck drivers, taxi/uber, etc). I also suspect some spill over against flights. It might soon be cheaper for a family of four to rent a self-driving Chevy Bolt to drive from ORD to MSP or ORD to ATL, than to fly there. Especially since, once you land in MSP/ATL, you'll need a car to get around anyway.
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Wealthy people will continue to be mostly unaffected, as they can already afford to live where they work, and can already choose to have no meaningful commute, anytime they desire to.
These cities would still be better off with SAE Level 4/5 and inter-communicating cars, which should reduce the frequency of traffic jams significantly. Traffic jams are almost ALWAYS caused by human error at some point in the chain.
Sometimes, sure. But there are a lot of key areas where urban roads / freeways are simply past usable capacity (even with smarter self-driving cars communicating together).
Most major cities have experienced significant population growth in the last 10 years, and have also built little-to-no new freeways or additional car capacity in the last 10 years. If I had to guess at the future, I would predict both of those trends to continue.
Really? The American myth of self-reliance and independent determination doesn't mesh with being driven around by a robot. The person who buys an diesel f150 or a Shelby Mustang isn't the sort of person who likes being driven around by other people, let alone by a cellphone app. The American myth is the lone cowboy on the horse, not the rich man in the stage coach.
Cars are not rational decisions. If they were, we would all drive gray electric minivans. Cars are a means of expression. They are class identifiers. They are thrill machines. They are weapons. They are Freudian. I'll be convinced about autodrives in the US when I see ONE autodrive car take ONE spectator to a nascar event. It won't happen in my lifetime.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8339097.stm
"In his paper Hazards of Horse-riding as a Popular Sport, Dr Silver cited a study from 1985 that suggested motorcyclists suffered a serious accident once every 7,000 hours but a horse rider could expect a serious incident once in every 350 hours. [...] The majority of people admitted to hospital in such circumstances are women. "
Also, girls engage in equestrian sports, I'm sure that non-sports horse activities are probably safer.
You also bring up the F150 and Shelby - I drive a Nissan Frontier ( D40, Navara ) mainly because I get truck-function and it sits lower and doesn't corner-dive like an F150. You can't confuse it with a Shelby but it's plenty of ... "hoss". The only way I'd have either instead of the compromise is that I had a rolling stock fetish (and was appropriately resourced to feed it ) and was collecting them.
I've seen what the F150 is really used for. It's a work truck in its bones.
Also also - Larry McMurtry tied the cowboy myth back to, of all things, some variation on Le Morte d'Arthur. That's not particularly American :)
Indeed, it feels hard like a hard message to convey on these boards: some people (me) enjoy the act of driving a car. And almost every reasonably wealthy culture seems to like watching other people do it competitively.
Wouldn't you use a teleporter?
Also, food for thought: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
The only way to win the "brutal commute" game is not to play.
As cool as it may sound to be able to work in your car during your commute, it's even cooler to work from home and have no commute at all. If my corporate overlords won't countenance the latter, they almost certainly won't allow the former.
The American Myth survived our abandonment of horses. It didn't seem to crush the importance of the Western in our culture.
Transportation in the early US relied on MULE teams more than horses. And east of the Mississippi, we rowed.
Sounds a lot like cars.
Back when my grandmother was still alive, I was doing a crossword with she and her friend. Crossword hint was "has a fringe on top". Her friend said "surrey", the correct answer, and followed up with "my family had a surrey with a fringe". My gobsmacked grandmother said dripping with envy "your family had one with fringe?!"
Two generations later, I drool over phones and gadgetry. So yeah, the driver will go the way of the fringe.
This has gone on for the 3 months I've used them as part of my commute.
I'm looking forward to the day where I get into an argument with a wheelless self-driving car about taking shortcuts and avoiding traffic. Simply because I have local knowledge on traffic patterns which most maps still lacks.
Uber could make life a lot easier for everyone if they'd just enable the satellite view, so you can verify that the driver will be sent to the location where you actually are.
(Edit: Instead of downvoting, consider explaining why I'm wrong. Maybe there's something extremely silly that I'm missing.)
If I don't know where I am on the map, what use is moving pins around going to be?
Case in point -- I was in Las Vegas recently, and made the mistake of calling Uber from under the covered walkway at a large casino/hotel entrance. The driver ended up being dispatched down a back road leading off into the desert behind the hotel. Because the map showed nothing but nearby streets, there was no way to tell that it was reporting my position incorrectly.
In the satellite view that's normally available in map-based applications, it would be very obvious that my reported location was nowhere near the hotel entrance.
Around here, the "satellite" imagery seems to be captured by people flying small planes back and forth.
And yes, that's absolutely true. I've been on streets that are right underneath bridge decks and drivers can't find. One way to avoid this is to set your pickup location to a business if one exists (i.e. a bar, hotel, restaurant), so the address is correct.
What I was hoping for was a comment like, "Hey, dumbass, press [...] and it'll turn on the satellite view. Everybody knows that."
And my worry is automated cars with no steering wheel still rely on these mapping services. They aren't 100% accurate and if you don't have any controls you can't correct for that.
Every time I had to reschedule a package delivery I found myself more cynical about AI.
You can't work around GIGO.
Also yes, the 'intersection' of a building and one or more roads is a subordinate intersection.
AFAICT it just asks based on distance so a driver that will be heading the wrong way to pick me up on a one way street takes the request and then I'm stuck waiting 5-10 mins as he passes me on the wrong side of the street, then calling me, then having to go several blocks to get back
It's frustrating to not know if theyve tried this or not
I love cars, the analog character of an internal combustion engine. But I can't wait until most cars are electric. It's so much more civilized. ICE cars will be left for recreation, race tracks, impressing a date. Fun curiosities that a toddler would point at when it roars by. But in large numbers, I dislike them with a passion.
One thing I've noticed in addition to what you mentioned is how conspicuous the smell of cars with ICEs has become, when I get near them or in them.
There will always be reluctant holdouts who cling to the American machismo of a loud, stinky, rumbling ICE, see so-called "coal rollers" who modify their diesel trucks to terrorize other motorists and cyclists by emitting huge clouds of soot on demand. It sure doesn't sound or look impressive; however, there is something deeply convincing about the instant and effortless authority of the electric motor's acceleration. And the Leaf is relatively anemic compared to other EVs available today!
Joking aside, they've snuck up on me more than once when I'm about to cross the street and they're trying to right-on-red. I'm surprised they don't have some artificial noise to improve awareness.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sou...
Blind people really need this sound and so the Leaf has a speaker, the VSP. It cuts out at about 25mph.
I'd like to see one of these self-driving cars tackle a mountain road in a blizzard, just not when I'm on that road ;)
We might be able to replace taxicabs thru automation likely in the next 20 - I dont think we will ever replace drivers. I see automation in a car taking the same route as autopilot in the airplane - not total automation, just partial.
That being said these technology companies always seem to move towards smaller feature sets that intersect with the use-cases of the largest user bases and power users are often forced to hack together their own custom solutions if they don't fall into the general population of users so if anything this article is a warning to not let the Apple's and Google's define how we use self-driving cars.
Transportation with know destinations (planes trains and self driving cars) diminishes the role "fate" plays in ones destiny. The invisible hand becomes visible because all arrival in a place is preceded by intent to be there.
So yes, it does signal at least a change to the American Myth.
On the flip side, car culture is already on its last legs. Cars became hideous in the 80s, and monotonous in the 90s. And increasing gearheadom is derided as lower class, non-white, or rural.
Cars themselves with their reduced noise, better suspensions, and more sealed interiors isolate their inhabitants from the outside world and the feel of driving. I once had the joy of riding an MG-TD: thrilling at any speed.
Don't mind F1, Le Mans and club racing, three of the most capital and technology intensive activities you can participate in.