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Comment by Jedi72 | Hacker News Reader

My 2c, instead of building autonomous cars/robots which work in our current cities, we should just redesign our cities to cater for these new ideas. We could have an autonomous delivery system with current technology if we just put aside some dedicated space for them to operate. No fancy AI, just good old fashioned sensors and control systems. Put roughly pallet sized tunnels under the roads, and it doesnt even have to encroach on public space. Way less problems in the long run IMHO.

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Yeah, it's not a far-fetched idea either. It's already been proven that dedicated lanes for buses improve road performance overall (especially improving bus performance) so at that point it should be easy to use autonomous operation as a way to justify more dedicated space.

If you're digging a tunnel underneath a city, you might as well make it useful by turning it into a subway system for people to use.

Making tunnels that are large enough and safe enough to transport people is a much bigger and more expensive endeavor than making ~1m diameter tubes for transporting goods.

A tunnel would need to be large enough to be maintained by humans when all the pallets crashed into each other and someone had to unjam it. We'd have a new kind of plumber

[citation needed]

https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/studie...

is as good a place as any to start. It also has plenty of citations of its own if you want to dig further into any aspect.

Basically. the biggest cost of building a tunnel is excavation cost and the cross sectional area of a tunnel is the biggest factor affecting excavation cost for any given ground condition.

Secondly once you add people you have to add emergency escape tunnels and related systems which is just more tunnel that needs digging.

Much of the cost of the subway is the access caverns, life safety systems, etc. For example, NYC built a 2-mile water tunnel for $250M [1]. A subway tunnel costs in the ballpark of $500M-$3B per mile[2].

[1] https://jalopnik.com/meet-pat-the-drill-thatll-dig-a-new-und...

[2] https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway

You might look at Elon Musk's The Boring Company. It's based on the ideas that self-driving electric vehicles permit smaller and simpler (and thus cheaper) single-lane highway tunnels, with simpler cheaper surface access, constructed rapidly at large scale (and thus cheaper), using mainstream vehicle tech, in a dedicated environment (permitting full automation, greater-than-highway speed, and vehicle coordination), woven in spacious 3D underground, with blended surface operations to whatever extent driverless driving becomes available. And thus traffic volumes/access/costs competitive with highways, buses, and subways. Perhaps picture something vaguely like Tesla passenger vans doing 100+ mph under bus routes, with van-is-the-cab elevators or ramps in parking lots.

i agree, it’s ridiculous that not all subway trains are automated yet

Why is it ridiculous? If you look at Transport for London as an example, the organization employs 25,000 people, of which 3,000 are train operators, with 600+ trains. The salary + indirect wage costs for those people is on the order of $250 million per year. Which I think is pretty cheap, compared to what you'd guesstimate for CAPEX and OPEX for an automated system.

Now they are actually in the process of automating the trains, which has been criticised by many as a vanity project. Certainly it has not been shown that it makes financial sense. And it has been decided that they will retain a "captain" aboard the train, for safety reasons, as someone has to lead passenger evacuation in case of an emergency. So the total salary savings will be essentially zero.

Fully level-4 automated may makes sense for new builds. But for retrofits, you can't satisfy the overall requirements without a human physically present.

>Now they are actually in the process of automating the trains, which has been criticised by many as a vanity project.

The DLR has been driverless, since it was introduced in 1987 ─ it is a working example of the paradox of automation, which states: the more efficient the automated system, the more crucial the human contribution of the operators. Humans are less involved, but their involvement becomes more critical. This will be the unwritten hard limit for the time-being, when it comes to implementing the levels of autonomy, irrespective of the condition of the rolling stock or wage costs, which are moot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

https://www.citymetric.com/transport/one-picture-dlr-morning...

Germany is thinking about automation, but for cost saving. (it might increase) but to be able to put more trains on one track and behind each other..

Yes, by always stopping in the same place, lines can be painted at entries and exits to speed up station flow.

If you want to erect barriers to increase safe station capacity, you need that too.

Finally, the automated trains will have smoother acceleration and braking, reducing wear and tear on the trains and tracks.

No, it’s not ridiculous. It’s complex, time consuming, and expensive to retrofit fully automated systems on to existing lines. Like any other project, the costs (disruption, financial) must be balanced with the gains (capacity, safety). Automated systems will continue to be rolled out worldwide at a reasonable pace.

I think Swizec's point is that the current pace, even accounting for those factors, is not reasonable. Let's not pretend those decisions have some sort of mathematically correct answer; how much to invest in public transit, for example, is a political choice that one can legitimately disagree with - and even find unreasonable.

In fact, it was possible 100 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company (minus the autonomous part)

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