What's your suggestion here? That garbage trucks don't pick up on streets without two lanes in each direction?
The reality of driving is that there are a lot of these messy situations, and driverless cars need to be able to handle them.
The reality of driving is that there are a lot of these messy situations, and driverless cars need to be able to handle them.
And importantly, unlike human drivers, autonomous cars will only get persistently better at handling these kinds of situations as they encounter more of them.
It's so an easy to just say human drivers aren't as good, but it's not grounded in any reality.
Just take voice controlled assistants for example. We've made pretty big strides on them, haven't we?
And yet an entirely unmotivated teenager who's doing badly at school working a 7-Eleven outperforms voice assistants by several orders of magnitudes, through the sheer wonder of context clues and general intelligence, no matter how dim you want to assert that teenager to be.
I am proud of my voice assistant when it properly understood that I wanted to indeed set a timer for 50 minutes instead of 15 minutes, while any person would immediately understand what I mean even in a noisy environment just from why I'm setting the timer, and even fuzzily adjust their behavior based on what continues to happen.
Anyone who claims automated cars can fully learn the arbitrarily complicated physical situations they have to navigate around is either disingenuous, or does not know how computers work.
You might have an overly-optimistic opinion of what AI can do. Not to say that humans are not stupid quite often, but we are very far from having AIs that can be as good as a 4 years old child.
AIs are good at what they know and what they can account for. So yes, they will get better at what they know, but they cannot, by design, get better at what they don’t. So there will always be situations where they will be unbelievably stupid because their designers did not think it would happen. There is no solution to that at the moment.
While I think it's a good idea I just don't see this happening in the majority of the US other then major cities. In my state I just don't see how it would be possible given people commute 30+ miles regularly.
After that, just copy the playbook from the Netherlands. Amsterdam was very much like most big American cities until the 70s, their streets were steadily being redesigned for human scale and less car dependency.
It can be done and it can be done easily if Americans stop believing in their Exceptionalism.
Do watch the videos, especially the "Strong Towns" series about the issue of how the rich suburbs are actually subsidized by poorer people living in bankrupt city centers. The only "straightforward" path for this to change is by getting younger people to participate a lot more on town hall meetings and to get their city councils on board with change. The status quo benefits and has no interest in doing that.
The Netherlands has a ridiculously dense population and is completely flat.
It's only a good model for other places with a ridiculous population density and pancake-flat geography.
You couldn't apply the Netherlands model to, for example, Scotland.
Electric bikes are too slow and inefficient, and require expensive hard-to-make components that depend on conflict minerals.
I think self-driving is more established in North America than in Europe due to less strict regulations, more availability of capital and technological investment, and particularly the greater predictability and homogeneity of the car-centric roads when compared to European countries. I'd like to see how a self-driving car handles Rome for example—if it can.
"Roads will be safer"? Yes, they are safer already on cities with well-functioning public transit.
"Less drunk-driving"? Same idea: if teenagers can live in areas where cars are not a necessity, they won't be behind the wheel and still be able to meet their friends, go to a party, etc.
"Less space needed for parking slots if cars are FSD"? Also true if people are not car-dependent.
To me, self-driving makes sense for trucks on highway roads, not for city traffic. And even then, we could also apply the same idea and think "why not improve the rail infrastructure"?
But anyway, how does that relate to the original question? Are you trying to justify your interest in FSD with the argument that would you give you some network of autonomous taxis?
Take the case of an elderly person with limited personal mobility. They are likely driving today because that’s their best option by far. They’re probably not going to start walking to their doctor; it’s probably not a good idea for them to take up biking. Taking a bus into the city center and another one back out to get to a point that’s radially 2-3 miles away and then reversing that to get home seems wildly less practical than hopping into an FSD ride, whether billed like an uber or privately/family owned. That’s what FSD brings over a status futurus that is less car dependent but lacks FSD.
There is also another video that talks about microcars for people with disability and reduced mobility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9ly7JjqEb0&t=397
No rational person can watch those videos and conclude that the best course of action to solve urban transportation requires self-driving cars. Getting FSD cars is just a rich nerd fetish which will not solve anything and likely contribute to make suburban sprawl worse.
The Downs-Thompson paradox may explain exactly what I see. We recently got priority bus lanes in my city (Cambridge, MA). The primary effect is that buses can now more quickly travel to where I didn’t need to go in the first place. Cars are still significantly faster, so people choose them.
Regardless of the amount of car traffic, a bus that goes from the outer edge of my city into the center to let me transfer to another bus to go out towards an outer edge at a different radial will never come close to driving point to point, even with parking aggravations. That explains why nearly everyone who is capable to drive and can afford a car has one. I think it’s also why many public transit advocates seem to focus so much energy on penalizing cars to enable public transit to become competitive. If competitively superior public transit existed, people would use it because they aren’t generally stupid. Even if it was roughly equal, people would use it in a lot of cases.
It is not about penalizing car driving. It would be a good start if the US did not subsidize car ownership. It the true cost of car ownership was put on those driving, perhaps cities would be able to finance better public transit...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajSEIdjkU8E
1. If fully self-driving cars come along at some point in the recognizable future, I would bet pretty large amounts of money that they'll be extremely popular in Europe or whatever else you're thinking of as not "car-dependent."
2. The amount of money, time, and intellectual capital put into building driverless cars is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket compared to the money, time, and intellectual capital that would be necessary to make a gigantic change in the US physical infrastructure. Particularly time -- there's no way that America is going to change into Europe, well, ever, but particularly not in our lifetimes, so if you want a better transportation system, I wouldn't bet on that.
3. But also, the time, money, and intellectual capital spent on driverless cars is non-rival to any (limited, local) makeovers that American localities are going to get.
2 and 3. The American way for city growth is the cause of financial troubles for most cities. And I cited Amsterdam exactly why it works as an example of how you can redesign a city to reduce car-dependency step-wise. Take a look at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6... to see the economic problems that plague cities in the US, and how a lot of them are improving simply by changing zoning laws.
It'll be the biggest boon to urban transit we've ever seen, because what self-driving actually does is make modality, routing and scheduling less important to individual trip planning.
Roads still require maintenance, and without a profound change in how cities are organized, these costs are always going to be overwhelmingly large compared with the cost of everything else.
> self-driving actually does is make modality, routing and scheduling less important to individual trip planning.
That is the worst type of optimization. It still keeps people in desolate suburbia and makes millions of people across America with the sensation that "commute time" is a constant that can not be avoided, so it should be at least made comfortable.
Investing to make the transportation systems smarter without even looking at how the urban spaces could be changed to get rid of cars is like the (myth) story of NASA putting millions of dollars to make a space pen, instead of using a pencil.
2 and 3: You didn't even remotely address anything I said.
That is not the relevant metric. The important metric is how many trips does the average dutch take by car that could be taken by some more efficient mode?
Lots of people in European cities have cars but use them only on the weekend. Or they use the car to go to work on the outskirts of the city, but manage to use public transportation when going to a football match for a night out. Lots of families have only one car when in the US it would be only possible to live if each adult had their own car, etc.
> You didn't even remotely address anything I said.
You are right, I didn't. Because to me holding self-driving cars as the panacea that is going to solve the issues in the US is ridiculously naive. It is an illusion created by the corporations that are not interested in actually solving the problem and just want to push out more cars, keep people addicted to broken lifestyles and over-consumption. And is backed by short-sighted technologists that see the world through their nerd lenses and don't stop to think if there are better, lower-tech ways to improve everyone's lives.
Let's just review this whole conversation:
1. I suggested to a poster who wanted to blame the whole Cruise problem on the garbage truck that garbage trucks do in fact have to block lanes.
2. You then jumped in and said that American should "just" reinvent itself so that cars weren't a big deal. You left it implicit why that was relevant here, but I think I understand you to believe that driverless cars are an unimportant technology.
3. I pointed out that "just" changing the fundamental mode of transit across all of America is in fact a tall order.
4. And then you've gotten less and less responsive to actual points until you get to here where you're now suggesting that driverless cars aren't a panacea, which is an argument nobody made.
To affirmatively restate my points:
1. Driverless cars, to be successful, must deal with a lot of messy road conditions, not just the 99% case.
2. If driverless cars do at some point cross the above line and genuinely become equal to or greater than the median human driver, I think they will be an important technology that will improve people's lives -- in both the United States and very significantly (if possibly somewhat less so) in Europe.
3. Driverless cars are plausibly on a much shorter timeline than remaking all of America's physical transportation/density infrastructure, and plausibly much less overall expensive than remaking all of America's physical transportation/density infrastructure.
4. Investment in driverless cars is non-rival to other changes to America's physical transportation/density infrastructure.
The question is whether people value this more than the benefits of not being car-dependent.
You might think that these are not connected, but they pretty much are. Taking that in consideration, I could bet that only a minority would be willing to accept the trade-off.
If in fact they improve people's lives, then great. And if people see a path to further improving their lives by, separately, changing other things about infrastructure or density or whatever, then that's fine too. Again these things are non-rival.
> And if people see a path to further improving their lives by, separately, changing other things about infrastructure or density or whatever
That's just a really twisted way of saying that you don't mind sacrificing the commons if it means you get to play with cool gadgets. It's a lot easier for one individual to go and buy a driverless Tesla and think "oh, at least my car does not stay in a parking lot after my ride is done" than it is to go and promote actual change in urban planning to avoid car dependency in the first place. But because you are (presumably) on the top of the pyramid, you don't actually care about it.
> Again these things are non-rival.
At the first order, it may seem like that. But after we see the interaction of these apparently-orthogonal policies (e.g, zoning laws and public infrastructure) and their inconsistent implementations the problems become very clear. It is hard to argue only with hypotheticals, but I could bet that if driverless cars became a reality tomorrow, cities would be worse in 10 years than they are today.
Also, you have no idea what my positions are about zoning or land use or infrastructure, as I haven't mentioned them.
Maybe they don't block the travel lane for extended periods, just like any regular person is expected to not do.
The article is basically saying "it's ok for the human driven car to do, but not the self driving car."
If they do that prior to sirens showing up there is no issue. They can’t predict the future.