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Comment by lr | Hacker News Reader

I look forward to the first test of 1000+ self driving vehicles going through a swerving road, multiple merge, plus toll plaza situation (like merging onto the lower deck of the GW bridge east-bound). If this technology is as good as claimed, it really should put human drivers to shame. Imagine no more traffic jams because of the needless “jockeying for position”, or the drivers who are clueless about the boundaries of their own vehicle. As someone who has been driving for over 30 years, I honestly can’t wait for the day this promise materializes.

Of course, if self driving cars defer (in a predictable manner) in order to prevent collisions, I can easily see how one or two human drivers could reap havoc to their advantage. It would become a new sport.

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Will look forward to it too, if we'll ever see it.

Traffic control if a big part of the problem, if not a half of it.

If you had 100% pedestrian free roads, with ideal road surface, and radio signalling, where a car becomes indistinguishable from a train for control purposes, then even with current state of computer science it becomes quite real.

This is the route most Chinese companies are progressing on. They are not making a self-driving car, but a "self-driving road." Something akin to air traffic control system for cars.

And this is only for things like public transport, garbage dumpsters, cleaning, and other public utility vehicles.

The bus gets a radionavigation receiver, radar for collision avoidance backup, and receives commends over the air.

In other words, railroads, just without the need for physical rails. Great, cool, useful. Not quite the usual expected result, though.

No road is 100% pedestrian free. When cars break down on the road the occupants tend to become involuntary pedestrians. Wild animals also exist.

I can see where it would be valuable, but it may cause more traffic (and therefore traffic jams). If it is cheaper and easier to drive and people can live further away from work with no penalty, it will lead to lots more cars on the road. It will lead to more sprawl, less walking and biking so more obesity, and massive damage to the environment.

Increased road usage taxes.

"For your own good."

It should be easy to gather political consensus for laws to prevent what is metaphorically like pulling a fire alarm for fun. Society would similarly disapprove of seizing up trains by threatening to jump.

All this to avoid building new public transit infrastructure. Crazy. Many of the thorniest transit problems in dense city centres are better solved by improving mass transit options, not giving even more right of way to cars.

Mass transit will always be worse than driving, unless traffic and parking are both really bad and transit can skip the traffic somehow. This is because of the last-mile (and first-mile) problem and the fact it can't be truly on-demand. The only way to solve these issues is with some system that starts and ends in a personalized trip, which would ironically probably be more restricted (it would probably have rails and fences)

Also, most mass transit have similarly restricted areas to roads, for example you can't walk on the light rail in seattle any more than you can walk on the road it's built next to.

Idk Chicago's transit is really good. It's getting crowded in some places, but still great.

It of course has an advantage - it's been around so long that the city has grown around major transit lines, so the things you want to do are all grouped around & easily accessibly by transit.

If you take a city like LA or Houston that has zero centralization and just slapped transit lines down, they would have trouble servicing everything and average person wants to do - maybe you can get to work on the line, but not the gym or grocery store.

Still, it would reduce car traffic, and over time it would encourage the desired grouping around transit lines that is part of what makes the transit so helpful in the first place.

I don't think it could ever fully replace cars in most places in America, as they are so spread out and many people will still want to travel between cities by car. However, even just getting most people to get to their 9-5 jobs via transit instead of car would be a massive reduction in congestion & pollution.

Living in a city that has grown around 100+ years of rail infrastructure, mass transit is slightly better than driving (1 hr MT x 1.5 hr+parking car). Sure, there's some walking, but with at most 30-minute tick on suburban rail and under 3 minute tick on city rail, a little planning goes a long way. (Also, car gets about 5x the cost per km, even before the public transit long-term ticket subsidies apply)

I think in many cases zoning and the way land taxes are done are a big problem holding cities back. It's not legal in many cities to make things walkable, bikeable, transit friendly due to laws like single use zoning and parking minimums.

GW bridge: George Washington Bridge between New York City and New Jersey State, United States

I think this shows the tricky bit: https://www.google.com/maps/place/George+Washington+Bridge/@...

Edit: of course it might be the other side... https://www.google.com/maps/place/George+Washington+Bridge/@...

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