Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambdadmitry | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think that self-driving cars is the penultimate American thing. They aren't effective or needed in properly built cities (think London) and they won't make THAT much good to the society eliminating taxi drivers. If we dig into the vision of what people want to achieve with them, it's mostly manifestations of American problems (poverty, systemic racism, homelessness, segregation, insular indifference to others' problems, crazy urban sprawl) which people don't want to confront directly, instead opting for "let's spend HUMONGOUS amount of money to keep everything more or less the same".

There is a solution for most problems people try to solve with self-driving cars: more cycling, better public transport, denser cities. Look at London: car use is heavily discouraged (20mph speed limit, congestion charge, expensive parking) and still the whole thing works like a charm.

View on HN

You're missing many advantages of self-driving.

1. Better safety - I find it very likely that self-driving cars will reduce the amount of traffic incidents. Algorithm will likely act more stable than human driver.

2. Better fuel consumption - again, more optimised driving patterns.

3. Better convenience - you can drink and drive(well, car will drive), you can sleep and drive, you can work and drive.

4. Better transport - self-driving trucks don't need breaks, are not likely to be overworked and will likely not block motoways taking over another truck going 2 km/h slower (yey European highways!).

5. Better vehicle utilization - we will be able to reduce total number of vehicles and all the congestion, environment pollution and money that comes with it.

While solution you mentioned really improve quality of life in cities, they do not ultimately solve issues inherent to car transport, where car transport is actually preferred/best solution.

Good public transport systems provide even better benefits for points 1 (accidents involving subways are probably still going to be rarer than for self-driving cars), 2 (you don't even need fossil fuels for subways / trams), and 5. Arguably you don't lose much on point 3 either, except that you may have to walk a few minutes to/from the nearest stop (which is probably good from a public health standpoint anyway).

I agree that this only applies in cities though, and public transport may not help much in rural areas.

> ...still the whole thing works like a charm.

I find dense cities don't work for everyone. Car towns are still nicer for the disabled, the elderly, and families with young children. Especially if stairs or snow enter the picture.

There is probably a way to build dense cities that work for people that need wheels and canes to function, but rebuilding cities to provide ramps, elevators, wide doors, and secure motor scooter parking is also expensive. There is also a last-mile problem for public trolleys and buses to be both available to the disabled and efficient for general use. That's why I think self-driving vehicles have a lot of promise. It probably makes more sense to have a larger fleet of smaller busses and then another set of small busses or vans for people who need a ramp up into the bus, locking mechanisms so their chair doesn't roll around, etc.

I'm going to have to firmly disagree on all points.

Car towns are the worst for the elderly. Most elderly don't feel comfortable driving but in the US, they're all but forced to do it to escape the house. Anywhere else, they can get out and socialize. Getting physical and mental exercise. You're also likely to find nicer single-floor homes (good condos with elevators) rather than "old people warehouses". As for snow, do you really want drivers with failing eyesight and reaction time to be driving on snow and ice? Or even shoveling out their car, for that matter?

I have young children. How many articles have we seen here about kids walking to school or childhood independence? Being car-bound makes that extraordinarily difficult or impossible. At this point, I struggle to think of an advantage of a "car town" for kids. Less time spent getting dressed in the winter, maybe? I suppose when they're older and even more "free range", I'll have to worry about how far they've gotten on the bus or train without me. I'll consider that being a victim of success though.

> Most elderly don't feel comfortable driving but in the US...

I'm talking about people who can't do stairs anymore. They're not walking a few blocks or driving cars. They're taking shuttles places or taking trips with the family. Shuttling the elderly around is cheaper and simpler in car towns. Scooting around NYC or downtown SF with Grampa in his wheelchair is rough. Rougher still when it's cold, raining, or hot. It's often bad for their health, even.

Car towns, maybe just because they are newer on average, are easier to deal with.

* basically never having to illegally park just to function

* car towns have plenty of bathrooms and indoor places to stop and relax

* elevators and handicap accessibility is much more common; dense cities are lousy staircases, steps, and narrow aisles

* keep gear in the trunk (changes of clothes, extra diapers, umbrellas, ponchos, picnic lunches, etc.)

* buckling a tired kid in a car is safer and more convenient than dragging them across intersections

* a screaming kid in a car is nicer all around than a screaming kid on a train

* getting around a dense town with luggage is rough: cabs don't stop, big/extra suitcases on buses is rough, and there are stairs everywhere

The math changes, of course, if everyone in your party is old enough, healthy enough, and responsible enough to carry their own gear. Some families with kids are in this category. But most families aren't that way, at least through different seasons.

Tens of thousands of people die every year in vehicular incidents in the US. Who knows how many more are significantly affected health-wise and otherwise in their life from such incidents. With self-driving cars, those numbers would plummet. It has nothing to do with your other claims, however I would say that it fits the Americanized "because we can!" fantasy.

Denser cities don't help that much, because you'd still have the massive scope of inter-city travel. The whole of Great Britain is only a couple hundred miles long in its longest axis, so it's not an applicable model.

As an American one of the things I'm optimistic for is that cheaper, more available per trip transportation makes more housing viable for people that don't want a car.

If that happens, it's a way out of the car trap that we are currently in, directly, but also because more people living without cars will lead to more infrastructure for people living without cars.

> better public transport

The Seattle Metro area is working on that. Building out just a few mass transit lines here, not nearly enough, is going to take until 2050.

By which time the built lines will already be far over capacity.

> more cycling

I love cycling, but Seattle is built on hills. A lot of them. Very steep ones. Also it rains, rather frequently, up to 150 days of the year.

Electric bikes help solve the hill problem, harder to solve the issue of everyone going around smelling like a wet dog. Tech companies may offer on site showers, but a lot of other companies don't care enough about their employees to bother.

But even with all that aside (I am a huge fan of mass transit), let's take a look at driving between metros. Right now mass transit between metros typically involves going from one city center to another. So in a world of amazing quality mass transit, it is a trip to DT of your home city, a ride to another city, then a trip to your final destination.

Replace that with on call self driving cars. Picked up at home, and get dropped off close to your destination in another city. Within that city, and within your own city, use mass transit.

With the light rail Seattle is building out, my commute from one of the surrounding cities consists of driving to a park and ride transfer station (because even though I live on a main thoroughfare, mass transit isn't coming anywhere near me in my entire lifetime!), then taking mass transit in to the city.

If I avoid rush hour, my travel time to city is 15 to 20 minutes.

An autonomous car picking me up and taking me into the city makes a lot of sense. Indeed, I'd prefer if all the money (and decades of work!) being spent connecting the cities around Seattle was instead spent building incredible high quality mass transit within Seattle, and the surrounding cities.

At that point, serious change to the layout of cities could happen. Transit could get ran everywhere, huge parking lots removed, lots of housing built close to work, and people who want to would be able to live close to work, helping ease congestion.

Self driving cars make that possible.

The technology that is being built in America needs to be built up around the, unfortunate, fact that we have suburbs. You cannot relocate the majority of the country's populous. There are 700k people in Seattle, and 3 million in the surrounding urban area!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com