Hacker News Reader

Comment by croes | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that autonomous driving will work in the next couple of years without infrastructure adjustments. We built roads for cars to replace horses, we will need to built roads for autonmous cars to replace human driven cars.

View on HN

If we're going to build what amounts to new infrastructure, shouldn't we build transportation infrastructure that does away with the need to own cars? At least for transport in urban and suburban areas.

IMHO they're the same thing. Automate all cars to get around the right of way and high construction costs that limit rail development. I think the upgrades needed to roads are minimal in comparison. Maybe some sensors and signals but it may be just perfecting signage, lines, etc.

Upgrading or retrofitting existing infrastructure to accommodate $60,000 luxury vehicles is not the same thing as building infrastructure that removes the need for car ownership.

Pavement holds up a lot better in rain and snow than electronics, and still needs to be replaced every few years. Agreed that it should be a bare minimum expectation to have the roads painted clearly, but there are plenty of roads in eg Chicago where I don’t think there is an official number of lanes, it’s just kind of a free for all. Just going through the whole system and deciding where the boundaries are is a gargantuan task. American railroads haven’t even managed to upgrade their signals for PTC without failures left and right - if riding Amtrak or NYC metro is any indication the cars will have to coast at 5mph whenever there are signal problems.

Yeah, I was visiting Tucson recently and discovered they have lots of roads with no lines at all. Surprisingly, it may have actually made traffic substantially more relaxed as I think everyone was paying more attention.

I live in a place with fairly snowy winters, which seems like a huge problem for self-driving cars. I completely agree with this thought that we should work on making our roads help the self-driving cars. If we had started that effort several years back, we would likely have a lot of road miles that could safely handle self-driving vehicles. If we start now, in several years we'll have a bunch of road miles ready for them.

Granted that the US has a lot of road-miles, but doing this work incrementally is the way to go. I have a feeling it will be faster to outfit the roads than to build reliable self-driving software. I will also grant that this is a "feeling" and I'm sure someone has done actual research :)

If this capability could be used to help hasten the move to electric vehicles, we could even get a climate change win in at the same time.

North East in winter has ~0% chance of getting FSD capable in the next 20 years I think. 80% of the population of my hometown can't leave the house for months at a time safely today; let alone automation taking over for that.

Great argument for more rail. Yes there are still conditions that freeze switches but that’s when you run gas lines under the tracks to prevent ice from forming:

https://wgntv.com/news/when-its-this-cold-chicago-sets-its-t...

Weirdest thing that prevents trains from running tho is wet leaves on the tracks, of all things, it’s too slippery.

I just don’t see self driving cars taking off for this reason: people want or need to drive even when it’s dangerous to do so.

Self driving cars might well refuse to move in bad conditions (my Prius gets very upset when navigating my overgrown driveway for instance, sometimes slamming on the auto-brake to avoid the plant-pedestrians)

Automated vehicles have existed in industries for years, and they operate like this. Special environments and tracks are set up for the vehicles, and human presence and interference are minimized on the tracks in order to minimize the potential for injury or death.

Ive been saying this for over a decade: we're working on the wrong problem right now with autonomous vehicles. Their chief obstacle is operating on the roads with humans. They need dedicated infrastructure where only autonomous vehicles operate. Anything short of this will be implemented in very restrictive, small, niche areas and never become the new way most people move around. Tesla and Uber, et al have taken this as far as it will go without infrastructure in my opinion.

I think we'll be on the right track when city planners reclaim some of our current roads and make them available only to autonomous vehicles. They'll need their own garages, highways and streets to operate to fully realize it. For example, FSD vehicles can be moved to dedicated streets similar to how alleys work in many cities currently (where they're largely routes for maintenance and utilities -- removing them from normal commuter traffic).

> I think we'll be on the right track when city planners reclaim some of our current roads and make them available only to autonomous vehicles. They'll need their own garages, highways and streets to operate to fully realize it.

I'd rather subsidize automated electric trolley lines in cities than subsidize exclusive roads for automated personal vehicles.

I don't want my tax money wasted on that. In most urban areas there's simply no space for separate autonomous vehicles roads. Would rather see that money spent on maintaining existing roads and improving schools.

And thats fair, every locale gets a say on how their city functions. For myself, I'd rather not have my town made up primarily of private vehicles clogging up traffic. I'll take a trolley/bus/train/cab any day of the week if I can get to where Im going quickly. I suspect most people who have to commute feel the same way: the shortest, fastest transportation. Few want to spend hours of their day in any vehicle.

That doesn't mean I don't want any roads for private vehicles. Just that need not make up 99% of them. Even if we knocked that down to 75% of roads I think we'd see amazing positive impacts on every metric (except the private roads; those will continue to suffer from congestion until cities offer a better way to get people from A to B).

> need to built roads for autonmous cars

Not any more friendly than they are to humans. AI driving needs to handle the general case. Otherwise a road that has a lapse in autonomous-friendlyness could be catastrophic.

We do a pretty good job of isolating certain freeways. There are freeways where I almost certainly never have to worry about a kid chasing a ball into the road and potentially hitting them, because there are 15ft walls on either side of the road, and it doesn't go through residential areas.

I could see some stretches of highways becoming automation friendly, but it wouldn't be anywhere near even a tenth of them.

The infrastructure convergence should concentrate on highways, where the highest speeds, most use, but conversely the least complicated algorithms are needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com