companies and cities should be investing their time into improving public transportation and designing our cities to be more walkable and make alternate modes of transportation more feasible. the US culture of using a car for everyday transportation is fucking insane, wasteful, and contributes to the rising cost of living across the US (not just SF).
I totally agree that better designed cities would be superior. When I took the initiative to participate in my local government, I was screamed and cursed at for the most trivial improvements imaginable, like a shared bike lane on a few miles of a particularly dangerous street.
Multiply that by the opposition to actual improvements and advocacy in every single town, city, and state in America.
Fuck that. Self driving cars are way easier.
There's a reasonable argument to be made that making forward progress while remaining safe when intelligent agents are willing to play chicken requires a good theory of mind, but I can't formalize it. It's "just a hunch", but that seems like a Hard Problem to me and not necessarily something we'll completely solve soon. There's been work along these lines with statistical/ML methods, but my personal suspicion is that existing work would quickly fall apart in a truly hostile environment.
There's also the discussion around navigating non-roads, potholes, and other infrastructural issues that the industry hasn't solved yet. I don't think these are insurmountable, just difficult engineering issues.
While its quite proven that slow, chaotic, and unpredictable environments are so much safer. Notice how walking through an all directions intersection crossing is incredibly chaotic, and yet no one collides with anyone else, or even when they do, it results in basically no harm.
The "slow" part, for sure. Harm in a collision is largely a matter of kinetic energy.
The "chaotic and unpredictable" part, maybe not. From the statistics I've seen over the years, traffic-related death rates seem to be much higher in places with highly chaotic driving environments. For example, 140 annual traffic deaths per 100,000 vehicles in India vs. 14 in the USA.
I think the answer is going to be government rules because it's important that self-driving cars are predictable when there's no human driver you can have eye contact with in complex situations.
That's quite a stretch. If you think the money would be better spent elsewhere, ok. But to call it a failure is silly. Personally, I think driverless taxis making car ownership less necessary will be a huge plus. It will also make life a lot better for those due to age (too young or too old) or other issues not being able to drive.
I remember the space program being credited as contributing so much to the economy via by-product technology. Certainly self-driving cars contributes to automating tons of things beyond driving people around on public streets. After all, self-driving car tech is really just a subset of robotics.
Of course if you are against automation in all senses (e.g. they're putting people out of work!") that's a different discussion.
"the US culture of using a car for everyday transportation is fucking insane, wasteful, and contributes to the rising cost of living across the US (not just SF)."
Ok, but to get away from that you need gradual steps. I'd say it is far less insane to call a robo-taxi when needed (possibly a van-sized one that carries many people at once, which become practical once more people are willing to give up owning cars), than it is to actually own a car that sits idle, possibly on city streets, 95% of the time. Also there will be robo-deliveries, so you don't need to use a car for such basic things as going to the grocery store. This can actually be far cheaper for the stores, since there is no need for large spaces consumers can walk around in. The whole process can be automated, including filling your order, putting it on a truck, and putting it on your front porch (or in some kind of box accessible to the bot). Stuff like this is all part of the same technological effort.
Given that you bring up the space program in the same post I'll stick with the metaphor and point out that you can't go to the moon by climbing up trees, or as Russ Ackoff said, doing the wrong thing right is worse than doing the right thing wrong, because making the wrong thing more efficient just makes things worse.
If you want fully automated, efficient transport this technology already exists, it's train and subway systems. We even know how to virtually automate them 100% already, 24/7. With the tens of bilions if not more spent on driverless cars you could have actually rebuilt a decent chunk of infrastructure.
Having individual people drive around in two tons of steel to buy a bag of groceries is fundamentally stupid and its destroying cities, whether the car is electric or automated doesn't matter that much and there's no gradual change away from it, only a disruptive one.
You still need cars for going from point A to the train station and from the other train station to point B.
And are you expecting me to carry bags of groceries on the train? How's that work? I sure hope the train has a stop in front of my house.
"With the tens of billions if not more spent on driverless cars you could have actually rebuilt a decent chunk of infrastructure."
According to this, it costs 3 billion a mile for subway. Maybe that's an extreme.... but still. You know how many miles of road there are that are currently used by cars? https://sf.curbed.com/2018/6/18/17464616/bay-area-subway-tra...
Also, one nice thing about software compared to trains: once you've built the software, each additional copy costs nothing. And the vast majority of the self-driving car initiative is in developing the software.
Also, trains don't help with avoiding things like making grocery runs altogether. Self driving cars (and other robotics that are benefactors of the technology) can make it practical to eliminate the vast majority of grocery shopping and other typical errands, having a robotic system deliver it to your door more cheaply than going to an old-school grocery store.
As for your space analogy.... sorry, but this is just different. This deals with existing infrastructure, existing culture, and so on. We need a smooth transition.
What exactly do you think people without cars do, or people who live in London? Or New York City? It works perfectly fine. Or you get can groceries delivered pretty easily and cheaply.
Yes you can get groceries delivered fairly cheaply, but it will be cheaper with self driving vehicles and robot loading and delivery.
Density enables rapid transport as well as many more shops in a given area.
Golf carts are definitely less dangerous but they still fail the “makes you out of shape” test. I’m going to make you exercise and you’re going to like it.
I usually just tell them to go churn butter and stop driving their own car if that's a real position they have. I don't think I've ever heard a sillier position, ever.
I love going directly from point A to B in a private space and I'm not ashamed to admit it. This provides value to my life in the form of comfort and convenience, factors that are so frequently waved away as irrelevant by anyone screaming "car culture".
However, it's admittedly obscene that for this privledge, my vehicle sits unused most of the time. I'd be more than happy to have a non-owned electric vehicle show up when I need it, take me to my destination, and then proceed to help someone else with their journey.
Its not irrelevant. But driving becomes better the less people are taking cars. So, even for people who would never take public transport or something like that, its beneficial to invest in it.
Being able to take a car is a freedom, HAVING to take one isn't.
For several years (until Covid) I took the bus back and forth to work every day. So awesome.
It absolutely could not, here simply is not enough space for all those cars. A heavy rail metro line can carry up to 60 thousand passengers per hour per direction, which is the equivalent of a 30 lane highway.
Either way, the exact vendor of the vehicle is a matter of trivia to the AV company, since the majority of the hard work goes into the software. Private companies have been servicing government contracts for decades, so I think it would happen if a government wanted it to.
Where did this stat come from? Caltrain fits about 650 and couldn’t possibly run once per 45 seconds to achieve that.
Heavy rail metro refers to a system like the NYC subway, whereas Caltrain would be classified as suburban rail.
A typical NYC subway train has 10 cars with room for 100 passengers each, so to achieve 60k p/h/d would require 60 second headways. This is shorter than the 90 second headways achieved in practice, though theoretically possible with automatic train control and platform screen doors. For a more realistic example, the cars have a crush loading of around 150 passengers, which means 60k p/h/d is possible with 90 second headways.
Suburban rail actually has a higher theoretical capacity than heavy rail metro, but this is achieved with very large trains rather than high frequency. Caltrain's new Stadler KISS EMUs will have a capacity of around 200 passengers and will operate in 7 car trains and 10 minute headways, so they will only achieve 8.4k p/h/d initially. However if we assume 300 passenger crush loading and 10 car trains, it could theoretically achieve 60k p/h/d with more reasonable 180 second headways.
Now running trains at crush load routinely doesn't make for a great passenger experience, but keep in mind that we are assuming a dual track railroad here. If you are willing to spare the extra 2 highway lanes' worth of right of way, you can lay quad track and run twice as many trains. Many NYC subway lines were built quad tracked so that express trains could pass locals, and Caltrain's ROW is more than wide enough to accommodate retrofitting another pair of tracks.
That said, I paid a lot to live right by a good stop on a good line b/c I too like directness.
It seems so inefficient to me to be putting resources into self-driving cars.
From the point of view of the commuter, a bus or train is "self driving" since the commuter is free to read, work on their laptop, etc. while on a bus/train. We've had that tech for a few hundred years, it is vastly more efficient not only in fuel consumption but cost as well. We should use it more.
I understand why people in most of the U.S. are reticent to use public transportation though, without descending into listing off the litany of reasons, I will say though that I believe those issues are all fairly easy to solve (to be sure, some issues require a hefty expenditure of capital). And I am a hypocrite — I too have a list of reasons that I dislike the public transportation (such as it is) that is available to me in a mid-size U.S. city and do not use it. (Christ, I miss Tokyo though.)
I am hesitant to judge, but to me the idea of a "personal chauffeur" (self-driving car) in lieu of pushing for more public transportation is somewhat gross.
Autonomous vehicles are an enormous market and well worth the investment.
What's a superblock in Houston gonna do?
It’s the “MVP” of city design. :)
Self driving cars just feels like a bunch of engineers wanting to solve a really hard and really interesting problem. But is it really the right problem to solve? I don’t think so. Currently we have:
>other unpredictable human-driven vehicles on the road
>no sensors or passive/active guides in the physical infrastructure — guidance is completely determined onboard
>no signage designed for CV — everything written in plain English, so you have to waste compute on object detection and OCR. And, you have a constant and unending need to collect mapping data
>no vehicle-to-vehicle communication whatsoever
Design the roads and signage for self driving cars, enforce an industry-wide V2V standard with NHTSA, and start small in some test areas that only allow other vehicles that are part of the botnet (perhaps not necessarily self-driving, but at least part of the V2V network). That’s a reasonable problem space. The current one is unworkable — the models won’t converge and they’ll never make it out of “beta”.
Tell that to Jersey City:
Transport infrastructure in cities absolutely can be redesigned quickly, if you’re willing to take a quick and dirty approach in the short term. Which is usually enough when it comes to influencing people’s behavior; it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be functional and feel safe.
In places with good bicycle infrastructure like the Netherlands pretty much everyone cycles (93% cycle at least once per week). In fact the mode share for bicycles is lowest in the 30-40 age range with the 2nd highest being 65 and up - highest is under 18. The biggest use for cycling is shopping (22%). http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2011/02/who-cycles-in-n...
But it has been done. It’s a matter of will. Not saying it’s de facto a good idea. But cities can be refactored. See : Haussmann.
Are you from the US? I find the kind of passive statement about the state of systems prevalent here. ( be it public transportation, internet infrastructure, political framework )
I start to doubt the capacity of this country to adapt.
(The common story is they were bought up and shut down by car companies, but that's a myth afaik.)
https://www.6sqft.com/before-after-10-nyc-blocks-and-enclave...
and a few more examples here, with the designer talking about the process:
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/wired-news-and-science-str...
That's a lot of money sure, but what could that get you if it was spent on infrastructure? That couldn't even pay for a 500 mile high speed rail from LA to San Fransisco which is now going to cost at least $110 billion [1].
[0] https://www.treehugger.com/praise-dumb-transportation-self-d...
[1] https://www.constructiondive.com/news/california-high-speed-...
You can’t board a train while soaked in mud, or pushing a Subaru seat, or carrying bag full of groceries. Actually I’ve done the latter two, but I haven’t seen anyone else doing it, and it had been extremely awkward.
Everyone feels driving cars are wrong, perhaps because of emissions, but trains and buses just don’t cut it. I even doubt a public driverless taxis fills the gap, as moving large objects on human driven taxis can be awkward enough.
If it were, you'd probably just go on a 10 minute walk and pickup enough for two days of food.
(When they do try to change it people complain about it and say "those morons just invented the bus again".)
We are all modernists now. Essentially, this means that we perceive technology in itself as a value. The primary value is not the end goal, say, for example, a healthy urban environment. No, instead, living in a sci-fi future with robotic vehicles is a value, because it is technologically more advanced than a future without that. In modernism, it's a sickness of the mind really, a solution cannot be imagined, unless it involves technological mediation. This has been the curse of human civilization for a good 100 years now.
Anyways, I don't think research in driverless cars is wasted. They are better than the current state of affairs. They can only be a marginal improvement though, they are not a paradigm shift.
I thought they suggested public transportation?