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Comment by PopeRigby | Hacker News Reader

I think self driving cars are a ridiculous solution to a problem we created and doesn't need to exist. The US building out the country for cars wasn't a good way to do transportation. If we just had trains going from city to city and subways in the cities, we wouldn't even need self driving cars.

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I never owned a car, but going anywhere, anytime, at will is a very real thing and cars are the obvious solution. Humans are terrible at safe driving and self driving will eventually solve this. I don't see how this is not the future of transportation.

The obvious solution often isn't the right solution.

We can go anywhere, anytime, at will after the roads have been built and the pedestrians cleared away, no? The occasional neighborhood also cleared away for a freeway.

All that money and energy could have gone somewhere else.

anywhere there's a road, and not forest, park, building, garden, trains, or people...

> Humans are terrible at safe driving

I'd dispute this. I'd say humans are excellent at many aspects of it. The high mortality is simply because driving is inherently dangerous and we do a lot of it.

I imagine the solution is basically what has happened over the last 60 years: gradual changes to improve safe driving.

"Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day.

An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled."

https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

"Over 90% of all road fatalities occur in low and middle-income countries, which have less than half of the world’s vehicles." Not really relevant statistical baseline here. Self driving cars aren't going to help in areas where people can't afford them.

Not in the near future. Think 100+ years. I can totally imagine owning a human driven car to be the luxury choice.

Seems like we're proportionally better at the seemingly more complex task of driving, than we are at maintaining our health. Heart disease in the U.S alone apparently kills about as much as half the number of worldwide car related fatalities each year.

We're going to lose the global warming battle if we don't reduce personal cars in transportation. (And no, EVs don't solve it, they still have way too big CO2 footprints)

> personal cars in transportation.

the EPA[1] says 4.6 metric tons of co2 from an average car. There were[2] 1bn cars in service globally, as of 2010.

“It has been estimated that just one of these container ships, the length of around six football pitches, can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars."[3]

1bn/50m = 20 cargo ships equal the estimated world carbon footprint of automobiles.

There are 50,000 cargo ships globally. There's your problem, go nuclear or go home.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t... [2] https://www.worldometers.info/cars/ [3] https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...

Have a look at figure 8.1 here:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

Road transport is growinv catastrophically in addition to dominating other transport in absolute terms

I have difficulty understanding how you can present a figure like 4.6 tons per car and argue that it's not a lot, especially as developign countries are headed dangerously toward widespread car ownership.

The "50000x" number about cargo ships isn't CO2 emissions, it's about other pollution due to cargo ships using bunker fuel.

Cargo ships looks like a diversion from lobbies. It should be relatively easy to solve (upgrading 50k motors is much easier than redesign transport on land to trains, subway and bus). The trick is to conflate nitrogen oxide emission with air pollution.

When I look at data I find that transport is "20% of CO2 emission" (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...) but shipping is "2.2% of the global human-made emissions in 2012" (form wikipedia http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/Environment/PollutionPreventio...)

What does it means ? Well, shipping uses dirty fuel and is very polluting but that's also a scapegoat for individual consumerist culpability.

I think it's pretty absurd that we don't have automated trains and light rails but somehow we think self driving cars are in the near future. Compared to cars on roads it should be trivial to automate trains on tracks. Why don't we go for the lower hanging fruit first?

> I think it's pretty absurd that we don't have automated trains and light rails

We do have them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

Not everyone wants to live in a dense population.

Call it speculation, but most people don’t really want all the consequences that come with the distinct lack of it in the US. Especially when you consider the economic effects of walkable areas.

While it is true that Americans rely a bit too much on their cars, and have built infrastructure based on it instead of public transportation, it's hard to envision a world where individual transportation is no longer needed.

Look at Japan, they have a great train network but still use cars a lot. Because while train works well in cities, you still need people living in the country side to grow your food.

There a massive gap between “all cars should be banned”, which you seem to be replying to, and “some urban areas should be allowed to densify and operate without cars if their citizens want that”.

That's true but it seems like the people advocating for policy on both ends don't understand the difference in density and therefore transportation needs between Boston and Boise. Everyone wants policy to be a state or federal level cudgel these days and quite frankly that is stupid.

I live in rural Japan and own a car. However, I lived here without one for over 5 years. My apartment building is surrounded on 3 sides by rice fields, so it gives you an idea of just how rural it is. I can walk from one end of the town where I live to the other in 20 minutes. In that space there are 3 grocery stores, 2 hardware stores, a butcher, 2 fish mongers, 1 tofu shop, 2 flower shops at least 5 barbers, 3 doctors, 2 optometrists, many bars, restaurants, cafes, etc, etc, etc. I moved from suburban Canada. In 20 minutes I wouldn't be able to walk out of my neighbourhood of cul-de-sacs lined with identical houses. Not even a single convenience store. It's a commercial waste land.

In rural Japan, cars are used. In suburban Canada, cars are necessary. There are definitely more rural areas in Japan than where I live. I live in an actual town. If you are up in the mountains, or live far away from a town, a car is probably necessary. However, for the vast majority of people who live in this country, it is not.

Most people don't really want all the consequences that come with the distinct lack of rural areas either..

But if you have denser cities, that leaves more room for rural areas. I don’t think anyone is arguing for less rural land, but as it stands, it is legally impossible to build another city like San Francisco or Manhattan in the US, and that’s a problem for sustainability. People want to live in those places, and not just because they are old.

The problem is not that you can't legally build a city like SF in the middle of nowhere. There are hundreds of smaller cities that could grow into bigger ones, but their population growth just isn't there. People wouldn't come to your "New SF" either.

The real problem is:

- Many people choose to live in big hubs like SF or Manhattan because that's where the high paying jobs are

- You can't legally turn SF into Manhattan (i.e. making it denser)

It's legally impossible to even build San Francisco into a place like Manhattan. Most the city is only zoned for two stories.

LA is zoned for a lower population today than it was half a century ago, and in that time the population has increased by 50%. Enter housing crisis.

True, but why not build out transit for existing dense populations which are congested?

This is true. But what I wish for is better public transport in countryside. Automated train that can run also late at night and more bus would have relieved most of my woes when I was living in the countryside.

You could even make it so that you drive it yourself and keep it outside your home to use when you need.

What an innovation that would be

Yeah, very clever. There is many reason why one would like to avoid having to take a care all the time:

1. I cannot drive if I went to a friend a drunk alcohol or consume weed

2. Why would I drive if somebody/something could do it for me, and i get to do whatever i want during this time

3. Gazoline, insurance, maintenance, repair, ... a car can be very costly especially if use intensively

4. Cars are polluting a lot, maybe I don't want to contribute to the issue of global warming

And yet there are almost as many cars as adults in the USA.

How do you think all those issues are solved presently?

Would be great if you could afford the $40k and insurance to house that 4000lb hunk of precious metal you spend energy moving around everywhere you go. A bus pass is a $1.75 on the other hand...

The bus pass wouldn't be $1.75 if it serviced the rural areas. The economics just don't work with low population density.

Look at NJ Transit, in rural areas if you have a train station you get 2-3 commuter trains in the morning on week days and no service on the weekend or during the day/late at night. And thats for NJ, which has high population density even in rural areas, is physically small and is part of the north east corridor.

Don't be silly, not everyone is buying $40k cars. And the bus is a great solution if it exists, but in most places on planet earth it does not.

263 million cars in an America.

If you visit Europe you can see this system working with a much less dense population and connections for small towns.

This is true, but there’s no rolling back history. We’re quite locked in to our current situation and the best we can do is work within the constraints that have been established.

I sometimes wonder, from a science fiction point of view, how cities would be designed if we somehow had foresight of the consequences (social, environmental, etc.) of building infrastructure centered around the usage of cars for daily transportation. We don't really hold much resentment for how things started since people just didn't know about the problems that over-reliance on cars would cause decades down the line. Would people still consider the convenience/economic opportunity the automobile afforded to outweigh the problems?

(Also, there is a body of fiction set in a future Earth where, since people several decades ago did have knowledge of the problem of climate change, they end up being collectively resented by their descendants for their inaction/ignorance in addressing it.)

Or set the clock right and invest in road diets and protected bus lanes. These are solutions that any city can implement but doesn't, because they aren't politically agreeable to local electorates. Nearly all american metros were laid out around the street car, anyway.

Those pesky local electorates. Always stopping progress.

Maybe, just maybe, the majority of people who live in those cities like the way they're arranged?

A small minority biased towards homeowners who stand to benefit economically from constrained supply and rising costs are the ones voting, not the majority of people who live in these cities.

it's becoming more and more clear. self driving technology will only put more 2000 lb machines on highways clogging up space. USA NEEDS TRAINS!

Trails will help highway traffic between major cities, but it doesn't address how spread out suburbs are from people's jobs and support infra (grocery stores, doctors, restaurants, etc). It's a chicken-and-egg problem, now:

- people are spread out because they've owned cars, so the distance doesn't bother them

- If you take their cars away, they're too spread out to support themselves, because of how the towns were built.

Totally. American cities we're built with cars in mind, and it's really crippled their potential. Densely packed cities with subways and a lot of vertical freedom are the best way to build. They prevent deforestation because you don't need to expand outward, and they help with pollution because you can have maybe a couple hundred metro cars instead of millions of individual cars. I'm not sure how this would be implemented now though, because like I said, American cities have been crippled by their car infrastructure.

Not necessarily: a self driving car takes you to a self driving coach for the long distance, then back to sdc for the last miles. All electric. Very efficient.

Not as efficient as a freaking train with hundreds of people transporting basically only what is needed.

The 'problem' doesn't even exist; non-autonomous cars work fine in America. Autonomy is a luxury product.

Aside from those massive numbers of dead pedestrians. (Edit: not that I think autonomous cars is the answer - but it's clear that regular cars are a problem)

I hear you about pedestrian deaths, but the numbers aren't actually that bad (accepting some level of accidental deaths will occur no matter what we do).

Cyclists coming in at 857 in 2019 and people on foot coming in at 6,283[1].

That's not too trivialize those deaths... but from what we've seen so far, I'm not convinced self-driving cars are going to do any better.

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2019-10-22/pedestria...

lol, there is a serious car accident in America every 3 seconds. People die every day in car accidents. Is that what you consider "working fine"?

> 'Is that what you consider "working fine"?'

First off, yes. It's a big country so figures like that don't mean a whole lot. I wager I'm more likely to be killed by cheeseburgers than by a car. 50,000 cheeseburgers are eaten every three seconds in America.

But another thing: if Tesla were really trying to save lives, they'd have this software turned on for all their cars. That's not what they're doing. Rather they're selling activation of this software for thousands of dollars. They're selling a luxury product.

Looks like about 4755 every 3 seconds

https://southfloridareporter.com/the-average-american-consum...

Owning your own car seems lime the much bigger waste in the long run. Imagine only needing a fraction of vehicles in total.

Owning your own car will become a luxury for many people. Kinda like owning a horse.

I‘d still rent one every once in a while for road trips and camping though.

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