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Comment by NonContro | Hacker News Reader

Right now, our roads are only designed to be human-readable.

But what if machines become the dominant drivers? We need to make the roads machine readable: Road signs redesigned 'QR Code' style, maybe even some kind of wireless broadcast system to communicate traffic light changes.

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That’s really expensive on top of the inherent inefficiency of cars: you’re paying a ton of money for something which uses a lot of energy and pollution (yes, even BEVs) to carry slightly over one person on average. Rebuilding the road system won’t change that or make climate change go away, especially since you’d need a lengthy transition period.

What might make sense is limited deployment in areas where the problem can be constrained: dedicated bus routes, truck convoy lanes on an interstate, etc.

For the rest of it we should be focusing on how to get people out of cars since even BEVs pollute far more than buses, rail, bicycles, or walking.

I've always wondered whether it would be possible to have some kind of compartmentalized bus.

Some kind of compromise between asking people to cram themselves like sardines against a bunch of strangers, while still allowing people to sit next to their family members and friends.

It's convenient to say a desire to not jam up close to strangers implicates its holder in some terrible character flaw of not caring for ones fellow human. But if you really want to get more people on buses it's a desire we'll have to accommodate and contend with.

You're describing a system that is operating beyond capacity. There's no special fix required other than increasing capacity, by adding more buses to existing routes or new routes. There may be political issues with allocating funding or getting authorities to acknowledge/address lack of capacity. But it's not something that requires redesigning the bus.

Energy consumption is a factor of distance. "Get people out of cars" in inherently implying removing the fundamental right to freedom of movement and living a better life. Cars have done more to equalize rural populations and give them a quality of life closer to city dwellers than any other modern invention maybe short of publicly funded water and power infrastructure.

I'd highly encourage you to move to the middle of the country and live a 30 minute drive outside of town (because that is all you can afford). You'll quickly realize that super bad evil cars are the means by which a good percentage of the population has access to fresh food, medical care, and other basic needs.

Energy consumption is a factor of both distance and efficiency: this is why trains are so much more efficient than semi-trucks which are more efficient than personal vehicles even if they’re traveling between the same points: steel on steel rails have less friction and the first two have better engine to cargo ratios. My comment was specifically focused on the latter since a huge fraction of vehicle pollution comes from affluent people driving in urban areas, not farmers.

Also note that I’m not disagreeing that mobility is important but that we literally cannot afford to continue polluting the way we have. You tried to make this emotional with the “super bad evil cars” phrasing but it’s a simple engineering question: right now, people have built lifestyles based on low subsidized fossil fuel prices and being allowed to ignore externalities. I’m aware of what that lifestyle is like – and how often it’s not “all you can afford” but “where you can afford to buy the house as big you think you deserve”, too - the latter being far less sympathetic when asking everyone else to subsidize it.

When energy is cheap and you can ignore pollution, you can drive an overpowered vehicle on frequent trips with minimal use of the total cargo capacity. If the cost goes up, those calculations all change: people pay attention to fuel efficiency when buying vehicles and combine / reduce trips, invest in household efficiency, etc. Cost-constrained American rural dwellers and those I’ve met in other countries with higher fuel costs don’t drive a vehicle designed to haul livestock to pick up groceries because it’s overkill.

That extends to things like zoning: the majority of people living in exurbs for financial reasons are doing so because closer in development was low density, often required by code, and significant amounts of land were required to be used for car storage.

Part of climate change mitigation will be reversing those problems, and that kind of thing seems like a more fruitful area for us to be spending time than trying to make high-pollution commuting more appealing.

I work in the area. I would say the static stuff that’s hard is stuff that’s also hard for human drivers, like poor lane markers or ambiguous signage. So I’m not sure that QR codes will help—-just fix the signage.

That makes a lot of sense, on a highway with three lanes, I'm always making sure to not merge to the middle lane, if there is a car on the opposite lane, to name another situation.

The hard question which really has nothing to do with the tech, is what we do if a self driving car kills a person. Made worse if the accident could be avoided by the majority of human drivers.

>The hard question which really has nothing to do with the tech, is what we do if a self driving car kills a person. Made worse if the accident could be avoided by the majority of human drivers.

we have already had exactly such a case - Uber. Even though Uber was totally negligent, nothing happened to them, beside probably some settlement behind the scene. In part they were able to wiggle it by showing a bad dynamic range video (which is completely different from how human eyes see in such situation) there the victim appears as if out of nowhere.

I think that case just sets the pattern that the autonomous vehicles will not be judged according to human driver standard.

Nah, they just threw the safety driver under the bus…apparently being charged with (negligent?) homicide.

Buying a governor really payed off for them it turned out.

Quite right, the Uber case is here:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54175359

So what happens with the human driver (you) if the same accident happens ?

If the Uber case sets the standard, then negligent homicide is a likely charge. The sentence for that in the US is "A minimum of 4 years in prison and up to a maximum of 8 years in prison" according to this link:

https://www.feldmanroyle.com/homicide/negligent-homicide/

You better hope you can explain it was a bug in the software in this situation.

Machine readable roads already exist. They are called train tracks and are already used by autonomous trains. They also allow for far more energy and space efficient transport with better throughput than cars.

What if we put some metal railings on the ground and had the cars follow them?

Reading signs is the really, really easy part. If your vision system can't read and recognise the signs and signals reliably, it's not even beginning to solve the other problems. Trying to adapt the roads to make this part easier is a terrible return on investment. 99% of what you could do to make roads easier to use for self-driving cars is basic maintenance: making sure the signs, markings, and signals remain clearly visible, which also helps improve the performance of human drivers.

Hmm. Reading signs automatically could be added to human driven cars, I think.

Eg. Putting the current speed limit on the speedometer

That already exists. I.e. I know for sure in the UK some Toyotas have it (even pretty cheap ones).

I remember watching a documentary on Discovery in the early 90s where they showed a motorcade of 10 Audis closely following each other using radar and some magnetic markers embedded in the road surface. They could maneuver within inches of one another, stop on a dime etc. I wonder how much embedding such passive markers into the new roads would have cost compared to the amount of money pumped into autonomous driving companies so far.

From anywhere to anywhere is also an unnecessarily lofty goal. Bringing me to the front of a store in a strip mall is nice, but dropping me off at the street is good enough. Even doing enough streets in a city to pickup/dropoff within 1/4 mile would be revolutionary.

I don't think that reading the signs and the traffic lights is the significant challenge here.

We can... but it's not needed at the rate things are going. AI will be able to understand almost everything humans can and it's way cheaper to not have to rebuild things for machines.

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