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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today:

https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...

Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test programs in some cities and it would still be more useful than the current state of self-diving tech.

Self driving solves the wrong problem, and it's a good 15+ years until we see this vehicles, if we even see them at all.

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I'd offer Kurzweil's (I believe?) observation that the futurist predictions that come true are those that substantially improve peoples' needs.

Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way. The transit to the starting station might be shorter, and the transit from the ending station will be shorter, but it's still the same experience.

Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving.

The former is like-in-kind. The latter is fundamentally-different. Consequently, if I am a consumer, how much would I be willing to pay for the former vs the latter?

Cell phones became ubiquitous because they were a fundamentally-different communication experience ("Call a person instead of a location"). Transit will be the same way, if it changes.

> Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving.

The problem with autonomous cars as compared to rail is that autonomy doesn't solve the other fundamental problem of cars: congestion. If I waved my magic wand and replaced every car in the bay area with a self-driving one overnight, roads would still clog at rush hour.

If anything, self-driving cars would make congestion a lot worse. If I had a self-driving mini-RV, I would live further from the city, and do my morning routine during my commute. Maybe take a small nap or get some work done.

Disagree - if traffic flowed more evenly, same speed for everyone, less lane changes, didn’t require the “safe distance padding” re-establishment at every light, the congestion would lesson. Probably not eliminated though.

Yes, if the amount of traffic stayed the same, having all self-driving cars would be a big improvement. But what I'm saying is that a lower cost of commuting (in terms of attention, effort, and danger) would induce demand. People would hate commuting a lot less, and therefore more people would do it. To offset that you'd need to either increase the speed dramatically or do something else so that more people can fit on the roads. Maybe smaller cars. Maybe pack self-driving cars automatically into trains. Maybe build a lot more roads.

But whatever it is, you need something major to counter the increase in commuters or else the road system will get swamped.

On the other hand, it'd so radically change the nature of being in a vehicle that it'd be hard to classify it as congestion as we currently understand it. If you're sitting in a comfortable pod with all the conveniences of home and productivity tools available to you in an office, then the impact of taking longer to get to your destination is much less significant.

As long as human drivers are still in the mix, no, self-driving cars will not solve congestions. But fully self-driving cars could improve road efficiency by an order of magnitude. There is no need for trafic lights, they can drive in very close formation, they don't need parking space nor search for parking.

Additionally, an inherently safe trafic system doesn't require 2 tons of steel around you for protection. The car can be stripped down massively reducing road footprint and ecological impact. You will also hail the smallest (cheapest) vehicle that serves your purporse, a single commuter can comfortably travel in a bumpercar.

I'd be curious what percentage of congestion is caused by accidents, which one would expect to substantially decrease in rate with autonomous electric cars (fewer impacts & maintenance issues).

> they can drive in very close formation, they don't need parking space

We have autonomous trains on controlled lines, and yet they can't run in close formation, and they still need parking space.

>Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way.

There is nothing ordained about this. If we stopped giving away billions of dollars of the most valuable real estate in the world (in the form of parking mandates and street parking) or stopped ruining neighborhoods with freeways and car-centric development then rail (and transit more generally)_could very well be better by these metrics.

Parking spaces seem unnecessary for autonomous vehicles. Wouldn't you just have dedicated load/unload zones?

> Even substantially expanded rail will never solve the problem of "I want to get from point A to point B, as quickly as possible, whenever I'm ready to leave" in a fundamentally different way.

But a substantially improved autonomous car driving experience - with cars communicating with each other (actively or passively) to avoid congestion, avoiding parking needs by being on the move always and increasing "bandwidth" by driving close to there other cars and still being safe - may look like railroads on all our roads. Bringing both these worlds closer to each other.

When you pack people into a train, you fit about 1 person per m². Pack people into a single-occupancy cars, you get about 1 person per 10 m², or 0.1 person per m². That's a 10× capacity loss that has to be made up somehow if you want to move people as efficiently as possible.

Autonomous cars don't solve the problem of inefficient use of land for transportation (actually, they probably make it worse since there will be a decent fraction of cars moving absolutely no one). Space is at an absolute premium in cities, and people really underestimate just how much space cars take up, particularly since that space is incredibly subsidized.

A purely autonomous road system would make much better use of space than the current system. For instance, you could discard with the notion of fixed lanes on a motorway as the system could nearly instantly allocate lanes on the basis of demand. You'd also be able to do away with curb side parking in urban centres, which would free up more land for commuting.

A train is obviously more still more efficient between fixed points, but self-driving cars are far more economical for less-frequented routes and more convenient for last-mile transit than buses.

The United States is structurally incapable of large-scale public works projects. There are a lot of reasons for this and they aren’t particularly partisan, rather reflect how decisions are made. My guess is places like China and Singapore will have the first true deployments of self-driving, because they’re actually capable of building road infrastructure to support it when it isn’t fully level 5.

I vote for China, as they have the political strength to allow it even at a stage when it's not yet safer than an average driver.

I believe that's not good enough for Singapore or U.S.

I’ve taken a cab in Shanghai and it was terrifying. If they can make autonomous cars drive there then they can drive anywhere...

Have you really forgotten the Hoover Dam?

The Hoover Dam was 85 years ago, the moon landing program was 50+ years ago, the interstate buildout was 40-60 years ago.

The disfunctionality of the US at large-scale projects emerged in the 80s, possibly to do with both the creation of the modern Republican agenda by Ailes (divisive populism over bipartisanship, and preference of tax cuts over maintaining infrastructure), and the acceptance of the environmental movement by the Democrats. Maybe also by the illusion that the the demise of the USSR meant the "end of history" and the focus can turn from trying to get the US to be #1 to prying to get a bigger slice of the pie domestically...

If it only emerged in the 80s, then it's hardly insurmountable.

Naturally, but it'll still take time (and money).

See "This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful: The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, believe it or not, Robert Caro is to blame" https://www.reddit.com/r/gwern/comments/ez0l93/this_is_why_y...

Of course the elephant in the room is money. The public doesn't seem to have enough money to do projects.

Why? Because structurally things cost a lot more than they used to do. ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/10/book-review-the-prices... -- http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-236-alex-tabarr... )

One big takeaway point - IMHO - is that there's no scale, no growth in construction. So there's no big market, no new frontier for optimizing it. Sure, there are always a few startups, but that's peanuts.

Where are the trillions of dollars allocated to get good at building things in this century/millenium? Umm, nowhere. (Or basically spent on iPhones, housing and healthcare.) So it's no surprise that everything is custom made, challenged in court, takes forever and costs all the funds available and some.

Not really. Rail in the US is spectacularly expensive; look up a few recent rail projects with dollar figures attached, they're billions of dollars each. That's the same order of magnitude as the cost of an entire self-driving research program (Waymo has taken $3B of investment, according to its Wikipedia page), which, if successful, would scale quickly and easily to the entire world.

If the US companies can't do it just hire Chinese or Japanese ones who have enormous experience to build the infrastructure way cheaper.

Exactly this -- plenty of other countries have figured out how to build rail systems without massive cost overruns.

Well good ideas from capitalism does not apply to public projects did you not know?

Yeah, just bulldoze some houses and apartment blocks, so easy to build rail lines. Why didn’t anybody else try this?

China and Japan aren't exactly low-cost construction countries. Actually, they're among the highest-cost non-Anglosphere countries (which are perhaps best labeled "stratospheric-cost" countries). Instead, you want to look to places like Spain, Italy, Sweden, or South Korea as low-cost countries.

Their costs are lower because their land aquisition costs are lower. The problem isn't the tech it's the regulations/property rights.

The expensive part is addressing all the local regulations and acquiring land.

Human rights (and property rights) can be expensive.

Alon Levy has put together a database on transit costs: https://transitcosts.com/

The important metric isn't the cost of the project, it's the cost per km (or mile, if you prefer). The construction costs for NYC in particularly are unjustifiably obscene--it's really on the level of "fire everyone involved and make the new hires go on a world tour of transit system agencies to learn how they do cost control before they do anything."

Not sure where you’re located, but when are we gonna stop saying “the US needs more rail”? It’s not a solution in this country and never will be (Not outside major cities). People are too spread out, we’re not like Europe or even Japan, where the habitation area is actually quite small. People want to leave when they want and go exactly where they want. Gasoline is cheap here making cars cheap to own and maintain. It’s tough to move things while carrying them on a train, a reason so many people have trucks and SUVs. This doesn’t even consider all the cost related reasons outlined in other comments.

Electric self driving cars are the future of the US.

3 billion per mile for the Downtown Extension in San Francisco.

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

From a mile high view, does it matter what the problem is? Early laptops got us the lithium battery. ICBM's got us integrated circuits. Calculators got us microprocessors. Maybe in twenty years we'll look back and say self driving cars got us human-level computer vision- to be applied to anything you please.

I 100% agree with this. A much better endeavor would have been to built a robot highway and only allow autonomous vehicles on it. Like trains but using 4 wheeled vehicles.

Why would that be better? 2.5 billion doesn't get that much highway and even less robot highway. If you're not someone living on or near the robot highway you get no benefit from it and the vast majority of people won't be living anywhere near the robot highway.

Conversely, inventing self-driving cars scales really well. Invented once. Commoditized. Sold worldwide for a profit. Massive benefits to everyone worldwide.

It's disappointing that Uber's research isn't paying off, but it's clearly a bet in pursuit of much higher stakes than making a highway.

I love rail but we'll probably see some kind of self driving before we get high speed rail between any of SD, SF, LA, or Vegas.

I agree but only because of bureaucracy and nimby-ism.

Indeed. Such is life.

Few people will own a car if self driving cars become a reality.

so uber's entire self driving program cost the same as laying down new rail for one new major route. that is definitely not the same cost.

It isn't the money that stops rail.

Even Silicon Valley levels of money don’t approach that needed to purchase the land required for rail.

I'm uncertain, something like 20 billion dollars (maybe on par with the amount of funding for self driving cars?). wouldn't really go all that far unfortunately for American transport prices.

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