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Comment by CrazyCatDog | Hacker News Reader

We need an infrastructure architect here in the us. The bus I commute on went under, and I can’t be trusted to drive 120 miles a day and keep my speed in check. I started looking at the most automated rides I could find (Tesla is leagues ahead if I’m not mistaken), and I’m still... driving.

I for one, would be more than happy to prolong my commute, on a dedicated, reduced speed lane, if it meant I could sit in the back seat and work. The belief that we’ll incrementally get to level 5 besides human drivers on the extant infrastructure (lanes) is very misplaced.

Fingers crossed that the feds can develop a roadmap (sorry!) to support the transition from level 2 to level 5. It will not happen on open roadways—lidar or not!

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> The bus I commute on went under, and I can’t be trusted to drive 120 miles a day and keep my speed in check.

I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest part of the problem here is a 60 mile commute twice a day. That's an absurd distance to drive for a job.

Totally agree but I serve two masters; both of which treat me very well—so not only is the commute the worst part of my day, it’s also the only negative part of the day.

Are you certain you've considered all the negatives of a 60 mile commute? I'd encourage you to read this: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-...

That analysis is pretty fatally flawed (at least for software jobs). When I was at google you could easily get by on working 6 hours in the office and commuting an hour each way. The housing cost difference was obscene and would easily offset the cost of a new car every other year.

Like most Money Mustache article’s the analysis looks sound because “numbers” but the numbers have a bunch of fucked assumptions to reach them.

> That analysis is pretty fatally flawed (at least for software jobs)

> When I was at google

So it's fatally flawed if you work at Google (or another high-paying tech company) as a SWE in Silicon Valley - which is a minuscule fraction of the working population of software engineers. It may not be the assumptions in the article that are "fucked". You might just be an edge case.

> The housing cost difference was obscene and would easily offset the cost of a new car every other year.

It's not just the cost of a new car. It's also the time and energy lost to the commute, the increased risk of a serious accident, the opportunity cost of all that time spent in traffic.

As a SWE working at a big tech company in Silicon Valley, I've done pretty well financially by avoiding long commutes - and had lots more spare time. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

> You might just be an edge case.

Yeah, aka the assumption is fucked. This dude cranks out shit on his blog as if it’s based on some objective stuff but realistically it’s a bunch of evidence based on his lifestyle.

> It's not just the cost of a new car. It's also the time and energy lost to the commute, the increased risk of a serious accident, the opportunity cost of all that time spent in traffic.

That’s the flaw again. “Time and energy” is not lost in a commute unless you waste it. If you are a competent SWE, you should be able to spend that time thinking about architecture, design plans, algorithms, data flows, UX, and on and on. Not to mention you can keep up on industry podcasts, industry news, and a bunch of other audio only shit.

BTW, “increased risk of a serious accident” is yet another misunderstanding of a stat. “Deaths per million miles” in the US is a general stat averaged across commuters, drunk drivers, poor driving conditions, old cars, and bad roads.

I’d posit that my chance of death putting along on the 101 at 20-30 mph during rush hour in a car with modern safety features for an entire year was lower than on a single night on a two lane road up in Sonoma on the weekend.

All driving is not equal, and that’s just one of the many mistakes the money mustache blog makes. I’m all for promoting objective analysis of costs, but it needs to be done on a case-by-case basis. Trying to make general financial advice based on averages is as much folly as trying to make a shirt that fits everyone by sizing it to the average.

> If you are a competent SWE, you should be able to spend that time thinking about architecture, design plans, algorithms, data flows, UX, and on and on. Not to mention you can keep up on industry podcasts, industry news, and a bunch of other audio only shit.

I do all of that during my workouts and walks, or while cooking my family a healthy dinner. All of which I have time to do because I'm not spending 2 hours/day "putting along on the 101 at 20-30mph". On top of saving a ton of money and helping the environment, it's better for my health and my stress levels, because I'm not swearing at the 10th person to jump the queue at the exit. Before WFH started I was in far better shape than my colleagues who commuted from 1.5 hours away because they could get more house for less money.

Long commutes are a destroyer of health, wealth, happiness, and the environment. They steal time from our lives, with our children and families and friends - the only non-renewable asset we have.

Way to miss the point. You’ve incorrectly assumed that you can work close to home or at home for similar compensation per hour (even including commute as a complete loss).

The differences for FAANG incomes make this simpler for you to understand. At Google you can clear $500k/year pretty easily (this was common L5 TC when I left) spending about 6 hours in the office. Let’s assume you spend 2 hours each way and it additionally costs $25/hour in driving.

235 working days in 2020 (assuming you do 0 WFH days and take all PTO).

2354$25=$23,500 in cost ($500k-23,500)/235=$2027 per 10 hours of work (6 in office, 4 commuting).

You work from home for 6 hours a day for a non-FAANG and clear... maybe $150k?

$150k/235=$638 per 6 hours of work.

Commuter hourly after commute dilution: $202 At home hourly: $106

If you’re rich enough to get a house for a big family close to your office, good for you. That shit just doesn’t apply for people that make these trade-offs.

> They steal time from our lives, with our children and families and friends - the only non-renewable asset we have.

Truly spoken with the privilege of being rich enough with a non-commuting job to not have money struggles. Everyone I know putting up with these commutes has to give up a huge chunk of income that will make finances a burden or abandon their community for a worse quality of life near the job.

> You’ve incorrectly assumed that you can work close to home or at home for similar compensation per hour

Having worked for a FAANG myself, that assumption is not incorrect at all. I know what I'm talking about.

You may not find a house with a yard or two car garage within an appropriate commute distance of the FAANG campuses in Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Redwood City, or Los Gatos. You may have to settle for a townhouse, or a condo, or even gasp, shudder an apartment. But there are ways to make it work.

Everyone has to decide what they value more. Big house for their family, but you give up 2 hours/day that you could spend with that family. Or lots more time with the family, good health, and less stress, but you give up some space and/or comfort. For me it's a no-brainer.

What work do you do - if you don't mind me asking?

Trains solved this ages ago. More US cities should be investing in mass transit. Self-driving is a long tail problem because the number of things that can go wrong is infinite. Keeping the cars on tracks reduces the complexity substantially.

trains are a great solution for point-to-point links between two dense areas (eg, city center to city center or intra-city transit). given that GP has a 120 mi commute, it's a fairly safe bet that they either live or work in a sparse area that would not be well served by a train. the appeal of a train drops off pretty fast if you have to drive to the station.

Trains didn’t solve this, they just made different problems. With trains you’re beholden to the schedules and the routes. They require dense living and comfort being packed in train cars with strangers.

FWIW, while this is a representative description of trains in the US, it’s now how they work everywhere. When I lived in Italy there was very regular service from my little town to the nearby major cities, and while the trains were well-used they weren’t ever “packed.”

We could have a similar train network if we wanted one, we just don’t want one enough to pay for it.

Those aren't problems, they're solutions. The problem is in your head.

No, schedules are absolutely a limitation

Whoever come up with a this levels in autonomous driving (L1-L5) must be marketing genius. Ideally it should have been Yes or No answer to "does your car support autonomous driving ?", just like alive or dead. Right now, it is just another reason in list of Road accident deaths, till it perfected.

Quite the opposite. It was defined by engineers, not marketing people, and it’s based on clear descriptions of the capabilities of the system, as well as who is in control.

The binary statement youre looking for comes between L2 and L3. A L2 system is a driver assist system, the driver is in command at all times. An L3 system can drive itself (driver napping or otherwise occupied) under specific well-defined conditions.

It seems a fairly reasonable set of levels. For example, L4 seems like something that may be achievable in the foreseeable future if it means something like full autonomy on designated interstates in some weather conditions. That actually sounds like something that would be very useful for a lot of people (and probably a big safety benefit). It just doesn't do anything about eliminating private car ownership or the need to be able to drive at all. But, personally, those are of less interest to me anyway.

This is law, so now you have to define “autonomous driving” in an unambiguous way.

Hence, levels. Besides, we're in a transitional period on this tech, so I think there's value in defining "how" automatic the experience is.

Always nice to see people that still believe in the government to act competently. I mean really, we can't even maintain the roads. There's no way we'll be able to pull off some next level plan, let alone execute it in a reasonable timeframe. There's a fundamental breakdown that's happened somewhere in the past 50 years that's lead to the inability to properly manage the country's infrastructure and this doesn't just apply to roads. Is it a leadership issue? Self-serving corruption? I don't know, but what we have now is certainly broken.

Not in the last five years, but gradually over the last 40 or so. The reason is essentially that we’ve been building road networks that cost more to maintain than they generate in tax revenue, and thus our infrastructure balance sheet is running more and more negative. We’re very poor compared to the balance sheets governments in the US operated on as recently as the 1950s.

> Not in the last five years, but gradually over the last 40 or so

Thanks for pointing that out. I meant 50, just edited

The folks at Strong Towns make this case pretty well.

I've thought this would be great for longer runs. Put a wire in the road or something for the vehicles to follow. Once you are on the wire some protocol for merge points (also marked on the wire) etc.

This is one of the options, have radar on board pointing down to follow the line, sensors are each end of the car...

> I can’t be trusted to drive 120 miles a day and keep my speed in check

If it's a matter of occasionally going over or under the speed limit (or if the speed limit on your route has sudden changes), you may want to look into getting a vehicle with a manual speed limiter. That, along with something like Waze, can be a big help.

I believe Jag and Land Rover (same company) both have this, and it's immensely helpful. It's basically the inverse of cruise: rather than setting a speed floor that the car cruises at, it sets a speed ceiling that you can't exceed (unless you push through the kickdown on the throttle in some cars with a limiter, in which case the car assumes an emergent circumstance and bypasses the limiter for that circumstance)

Yup. Especially in my Jaguar, which has a lot of HP (~500), and active cabin noise-canceling and air ride suspension, and it is very easy to find yourself at quite high speeds.

My wife’s bmw has it too—but that’s too easy to disengage. Needing to pull over and get out to change the limiter would cool any road rage. I should have said: I’m willing to accept a longer commute and up to twice as costly autonomous vehicle over the alternative which is me having to pay attention and frustrated for 60 minutes twice a day—-even once a week!

it's hard for me to see how this would be more safe. sometimes safety is best served by exceeding the speed limit. this is actually not uncommon. for example, a semi has pulled up next to me on the interstate and a turn is coming up. there is a car right behind me so I can't just hit the brakes and let the truck pull ahead. I really don't want to be right next to a semi during the turn, so I quickly accelerate past it.

IME BMWs have a rather ambiguous hair-trigger to disengage the speed limiter, unlike some other makes where you would need to push the gas pedal to kickdown (with the obvious tactile bump) for the same. I think that might be skewing GP's view.

Losing the ability to change the limit or (dis)engage at will makes the feature practically useless too, considering the various speed limit zones one goes through in one drive -- not to mention dynamic speed limits based on weather and other conditions.

I think a lot of new cars come with it. Both of ours did, and it wasn't something we looked for.

Tesla has that too (speed limit mode).

Or you know, cruise control.

Get a cheap 2017 Toyota Camry/Carolla and throw a Comma 2 in it. Car is half the price of a model 3 and for ~$1300 you can get level 2 ADAS.

I have it in a less than optimal car (Honda Fit) and it has transformed how I drive.

>Tesla is leagues ahead if I’m not mistaken

You are. Pretty much every other manufacturer offers adaptive cruise control, lane keeping, and the like. They're just honest about their capabilities.

Comparing Tesla's "full self driving" features to adaptive cruise control or lanekeeping is a very dishonest representation of the capabilities.

edit: I'm pretty anti-Tesla (strongly dislike the focus on the central screen and other driver-hostile 'features', don't think "full self driving" should be advertised as such, etc). But I still think their capabilities are significantly above the other car manufacturers enough that they shouldn't be directly compared in that way. But I guess readers like the fact that calling them "adaptive cruise control" and "active lanekeeping" is more accurate and much less bullshitty than Tesla.

Tesla doesn’t have full self driving yet. For the core autopilot features, reviews I’ve seen of GM SuperCruise rate it ahead of Tesla for lane-keeping and adaptive cruise control. The other advanced features that Tesla offers - navigation on AP and summon - are not much more than parlor tricks. I say this as a Tesla driver with access to those features on my car ...

You’re in luck. The Democratic majority in US congress has just announced yesterday that their next priority after passing the American Rescue Act will be a national infrastructure plan.

https://twitter.com/hugolowell/status/1370488211034755072

Like, "shovel ready jobs" ?

I don’t know what that means.

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