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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

If you thought drivers on the road are bad now, this is is a sneak peek of the dystopian future where other drivers on the road drive like they are a support ticket for Facebook or Google. If your situation isn’t covered by the preprogrammed logic, you’re out of luck with nobody to talk to. Self driving vehicles belong on rails.

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This is almost the plot to the Doctor Who episode Gridlock.

Yep and all phones should be copper land lines. Yawn.

The technology will get there, but it hasn’t yet. In the meantime, if the technology fails, someone needs to be available and able to intervene immediately.

This would make sense if rails were some sort of outmoded transit mechanism, but they can be significantly faster, more efficient, and more pleasant.

speaking without insane latency causing me to interrupt constantly and with full bandwidth? where do I sign up?

Rails are too restrictive for real life. I trust a self driving fleet to respond immediately to an emergency by stopping. Maybe causing a disruption but very little loss of life or property.

Rails are too restrictive for real life? I'm not sure what you are trying to say here... Rails are widely used for real life around the globe. In many, many places rails significantly out perform cars to the point that people choose not to own cars.

Yes point A to B on extremely selective routes or if you only want to go to/between towns/cities your whole life.

Trams work well in the UK. Their advantage is their predictability, both in terms of how long they will be following the exact same route (rails mean this is hard to change) and their ability to remain unaffected by other traffic due to priority signals, some non-shared routes, etc.

Yes they don’t go everywhere, but in the UK we aren’t very spread out in our cities, towns and even suburbs, so it’s reasonable to expect quite a large number of people to be within walking or cycling distance of a tram stop.

Lol, look at a map of Tokyo and Japan's rail network. Or Switzerland, or the Netherlands, or Hong Kong, or honestly nearly anywhere that actually builds rails.

You can do just fine on rails.

Sure, if you want to get into the rural mountains you might need to rent a car. But like, for most people rail will do you just fine.

Unless the emergency requires moving the vehicle.

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-fire-truck-block-san-fran...

Until we do a better job of solving these issues, we need to have backup drivers available in these vehicles, or, the vehicles should be operating in places where dumb breakdowns don’t block ambulances and fire trucks.

Makes you wonder how Europe, NYC, Boston, and (a lot of others) manage with their real life concerns and public transportation system.

Trains/subways are great within a city but don’t work well for larger areas.

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