Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco
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Neither my house or workplace is adequately serviced by public transport, and even if they both were, I wouldn't use it unless legally or financially forced to. I enjoy proceeding directly from point A to B in the comfort of a private space, and so do very many other people.
The waste of personally-owned automobiles is admittedly abhorrent. Electrification and self-driving systems (and the resulting fleets of cheap automated taxis) will go a long way towards reducing the waste inherent to automobiles.
The problem is after the 50’s, in much of the country, development consists of large residential-only suburban developments feeding into highways. So streetcars won’t work for that
You don’t need full automation with the efficiency that trains provide when moving lots of people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ
Notice how in The Netherlands, despite making bikes, transit, and pedestrians welcome in this suburban business park near the airport, you can still drive there if you want.
Yes, if you lived in The Netherlands, you could drive to this business park shown in the video in your personal vehicle. There's a parking garage right there, and even though the infrastructure is pedestrian and bicycle focused and prioritized, the cars don't have to wait long at the traffic signal or endure crazy traffic.
Why is that? Because there are fewer cars.
Why are there fewer cars? Because there are viable alternatives.
Essentially, having better public transit, pedestrian, and cycling infrastructure actually makes life better for drivers, too!
The thing is, in North America, in most places you don't actually have any sort of choice on whether you want to drive or not. If you don't drive, your entire environment is hostile to your very existence, and public transit is just for the poor and desperate. You must buy a car whether you want to or not. That's not really choice or freedom.
You're saying that you would choose a personal vehicle, but does that choice have the potential to change if the surrounding circumstances change?
So, it's perfectly fine that you'd prefer to own an automobile. You're free to pay the close to $10,000 a year it costs for the average person to own a new car according to AAA.
I personally wouldn't make that choice if I had a better one available, but if I live in suburban America the choice has been made for me.
> Electrification and self-driving systems (and the resulting fleets of cheap automated taxis) will go a long way towards reducing the waste inherent to automobiles.
This is what's so frustrating about talking about the future of the transportation with people who can't imagine a world that lessens the emphasis on car-scale infrastructure. The waste problem with automobiles has already been solved. It has been solved by not using them as much.
This isn't a hypothetical. We have living, working examples of how to use cars less often in small towns, medium sized suburbs, and big cities.
Making cars self-driving is putting lipstick on a pig. It's like taking high blood pressure drugs instead of losing weight.
All I was getting at with my original comment is that "trains for everyone" is as ridiculous of a concept as "cars for everyone".
> You're saying that you would choose a personal vehicle, but does that choice have the potential to change if the surrounding circumstances change?
Sure, as mentioned, if severe artificial barriers are put up to car usage, I would begrudgingly change. Absent that, no, I like my personal space. I like not getting rained on, not getting snowed on and not walking through -30C temperatures. Currently, I can get into a personal vehicle inside a garage, and proceed directly to my workplace's garage. Buses and trains will never match that, at least, not in the city I live in.
> Making cars self-driving is putting lipstick on a pig. It's like taking high blood pressure drugs instead of losing weight.
It's tremendously frustrating to constantly butt up against the foregone conclusion of "car is intrinsically bad no matter what". Safety and environmental impact are commonly accepted as the two largest issues with cars. We are poised to address both of these over the next two decades. Yet cars are still somehow intrinsically bad nonetheless? Is usage of a vehicle bad if one is not sharing the interior of it with a certain number of other people at any given time?
At the end of the day, I am a strong believer in enabling people to live their lives the way they want to, when reasonably practical. To cover most of the population, this means building pedestrian and cyclist friendly infrastructure, public transit, and supporting the safe and efficient use of personal vehicles too. And there's nothing stopping this from all coexisting, as you've already stated.
Urban designs that encourage (practically require) walking a few more kilometres/miles a day would add years to healthy lifespan at a population level.
So if you prefix "Health and" to Safety, then yes, cars are intrinsically worse than most alternatives.
Also, the environmental impact of cars does not just come from their emissions. Spreading cities out requires longer (and thicker) wires, longer pipes, and more maintenance of roads and berms, and it causes more soil loss.
Self driving and electric motors (I am guessing these are what you refer to with "we are poised to address") can't solve these problems.
In transport the choices are not between "good" and "bad", they are between bad with one set of disadvantages, and bad with another set of disadvantages. To me, urban designs that require less transport overall are to be preferred.
Yes. That's effectively what cities had at the turn of the last century. And then they ripped up all the tracks or paved them over.
They recently did a full depth reconstruction on a street in my neighborhood in Somerville, Massachusetts which entailed digging up the old streetcar rails, ties, and brick substrate from under the pavement.
Only one or two nationalities would insist on using a vehicle for that trip, though.
We are discussing high-density cities where the problem in the article is occurring.
There is more entitlement in your argument than I care to address, but it serves as a strong reminder of why American cities are so travel-hostile compared to European cities.
Why would electric vehicles reduce waste? Cleaner, sure. But we’d be just as capitalist. City people didn’t ditch their cars and buy their pristine 4WD Ford Trucks that they use to transport their kids because this was the cheaper and saner option.
Electric vehicles will just mean these people will ditch their current vehicles and buy a new Cyber Truck every few years.
Lock downs during the pandemic showed us what needs to be done: Get rid of as many vehicles as possible. Remember all the wildlife that came back and the cleaner air?
What AV addresses is primarily a last-mile problem. Last mile is all about the personal transport solution, and cars are just the largest of those. The physics and geometry of cars means that they are more expensive because they are literally more mass being moved around. Bikes and scooters have become much better personal transport recently because they now have electric assist options, and so are more accessible for more situations and capable of pulling heavy loads. So the problems of cars are already being addressed from one end; bike-friendly infrastructure is lagging behind in much of the world, but it's also one of the cheapest changes you can make to a road, and far cheaper than adding a new metro stop.
Once AV is adopted, the physical economics remain the same, but the economics of rental change; you don't have to go where the fleet is, it shows up at the door. But that doesn't result in everyone riding a personal limo. Smaller is cheaper for personal transport in the last mile, and that does not change just because you replaced the driver. Cost reduction will take place in shared rental fleets. Cost reduction means cars get smaller, so car infrastructure can get smaller, so last-mile alternatives gain space, so transit gains space and ridership. AV is not in conflict with transit, rather, it redefines the bottlenecks of transit modalities. If you need a sit-down vehicle with a cabin for your trip, you still don't need additional empty seats - unless you pay a premium, you will be crammed into the lightest, smallest thing that is roadworthy. Only an enthusiast will bother with lugging a huge vehicle around town if you can rent that size on demand. That goes for the car and it goes for the train. You still want to have transit to cover longer distances along major corridors, but the effective coverage of all stops is bolstered if you can pick up a bike or scooter share at either end of the trip.
[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...
Well, you know, we all want to change the world.
Unfortunately when solving a problem you have to address reality and not some non-existent ideal.
Self driving cars are a much more realistic solution than getting billions of people to move to an expensive city where they’ll have 5% as much space as they’re used to.
They are trains, sans every major problem with trains: almost no fixed infrastructure, no last mile problem, no expensive human driver/conductor, yet similar vehicle construction cost per seat.
Eventually they'll block off a lane of every major freeway and you'll be able to go anywhere in the country at an average of 160 mph, with no need for bulldozers, eminent domain, new viaducts, years of environmental review, etc.
Took a long time to realize that next to one of the buildings in town was a train station. And twenty years ago there were buses, too.
Anyway, solve the last mile by funding transit and rebuilding trains. We had them before, we should have them again.
the suburbs are hell. everything's far. walking is dangerous and unpleasant. the city's sprawled, so everyone commutes to a diffuse cloud of points between the cities.
I hate living in the suburbs because I'm a wheelchair user, and walkable places are safer and more accessible. so I like your idea, I just think the burbs are beyond saving.
“Modern” car dependent suburbs are beyond saving. We should save the towns we can and resist this suburb-style development in and around cities.
What if we had a publicly funded self driving car network?
No more drunk drivers mowing down children, no more gigantic parking lots everywhere (like uber, you wouldn't likely get in the same car that took you there).
It would also almost certainly reduce traffic fatalities to near zero.
In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT spending X hours of your own mental bandwidth and focus worrying about crashing a deadly vehicle. You could spend that time reading/learning, relaxing watching a movie, or any number of activities other than driving your metal coffin around.
Obviously there are a lot of hurdles to get there, but let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Maybe in the future it’ll suddenly go from bad technology to good, but in my mind it’s like betting on generalized AI or small-scale cold-fusion nuclear: it could happen, but not a great idea to bet the farm on it.
Second. Car form factor is inefficient. Are we doing 1-seaters? 4 seaters with 3 empty seats usually? So every car has four wheels, its own computer, its own engine, and so on? In intersections, even with self-driving technology that does not exist currently and is showing no signs of existing any time soon - even with that technology, you’re still threading individual cars through each intersection? It’s not great.
Third. I’ve seen no evidence that the people talking about self-driving cars as a shared or car share-like resource actually believe in it. Remember Musk talking about how public transit is gross because other people breathe on you? Or the tendency of Americans to treat their cars as sacred property, so much that they’ll get in a fistfight with anyone who touches them? Transforming self-driving cars to some sort of public-ish transit requires just as much worldview shifting as actually using public transit, but none of the benefits.
So: if self-driving cars suddenly exist, sure. But right now, there is no baby. There is only bathwater.
I don't see any harm in trying though, or continuing to try and improve them. If we had said that a boom-box sized car phone wasn't useful enough, so why bother trying, where would phones be now?
Besides, you can probably point to any number of people in history that said that humans would never fly, that computers were unwieldy room-sized devices that consumers would never use, that the internet would never be anything more than communication between universities.
It's also just fun to think about the possibilities! :)
The problem is when folks - and I’m not saying just like this thread, but this is a phenomenon in some governance - when folks say that self-driving cars mean that we should reduce public transit or rail investment now, because those problems will be solved, right around the corner, as soon as the cars work.
If/when self-driving cars happen, sure, that’ll be great! People who are skeptical about the technology aren’t going to stop Tesla or Waymo from forging ahead. But car-centric planning does, currently, reduce public transit investment, and self-driving car hype does reduce the political will to build rail.
Cars are inefficient. It has nothing to do with the operators, ride-sharing, time-sharing, clever routing, the powertrain, energy storage, emissions, etc. The form-factor itself is horrendously inefficient for moving people. In terms of traffic density cars are virtually the worst mode of transportation we have.[1]
It's not an argument against automation, it's an argument against cars. (Particularly in America: where people seem to want the largest, heaviest vehicles they're allowed to operate w/ a typical license. On a daily basis I see multiple vans or trucks, most weighing in excess of 4,000 lbs now, transporting a lone individual.)
>In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT spending X hours of your own mental bandwidth and focus worrying about crashing a deadly vehicle.
You can get that, right now, without investing another cent in self-driving cars. There is plenty of time (and space!) to curl up with a good book on a train, for instance.
1. exists concept of linear city, and exists few implementations, most known:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd
2. In linear city, possible to create just one line of train, and station every mile, and all other transport muscular, or something like pneumatic-mail and open conveyors.
In some cases, could be effective to make rectangular network of train lines.
Sure, for old cities with lot of legacy, only train transport in many cases impractical, because usually their logistic network is not linear and even not rectangular. And train largest problem, is large radius of turn.
Currently in most large cities exists underground train or light city train, in different countries named tube, metro, underground.
EDIT: or just drive, as you do now.
No. The comment you're replying to specifically said "walk", while the comment at top of thread specifically mentioned that building trains "requires a move towards high-density housing". High density housing, trains, and walking is a solved transportation solution for cities with much higher/denser populations than we have in North America.
Getting there from here is not such a solved solution, but the general process many places are working on goes:
build train (with park and ride at outskirts for current ridership) --> build high density mixed use near stations (which now doesn't need parking for each unit) --> rinse and repeat until city is more sustainable without blowing $$$,$$$,$$$ on road capital projects every year to deal with ever-increasing traffic
As I said, "the general process many places are working on". Look up cities in Can/US/Aus currently building light rail systems and you'll see who is working on it (with greater or lesser degrees of commitment, which will have corresponding outcomes in a decade or so).
North American cities successfully built themselves to be car dependent when no one else ever had, now they just need to work in reverse. The problems aren't functionally different whether it's cars jammed in stop-and-go on an interstate, trains overcrowded on a regional rail, horse and carriages clogging a bridge in medieval england (eg like discussed in the historical fiction World Without End), or individual people jamming the gates at Mecca or a large concert entrance/exit.
The root problem is vehicle lanes can only accomodate a few thousands of vehicles per hour at most (1800 at 2s following distance), while trains can easily accomodate tens of thousands of passengers in the same right of way. Even a sidewalk can (but generally don't) accomodate more users than single occupant vehicles on a highway lane.
But I think this is mostly because there high density of population, so they long time ago faced problem of transport large number of people, before appear large city buses.
In other words, are they actually going to deliver the long-haul, end-all-be-all transit solution that many of its proponents imagine they will? Or is it just a nice-to-have feature that will make driving a little safer and a little easier for some people? And if so, is that value really worth the incredible amount of effort that's gone into making it a reality?
Will they be the end-all-be-all? I mean, that's an easy question to answer: no. Universally. For anything you want to bring up. Nothing is perfect.
It seems to me that you're making very weak claims dressed up in very strong language.
All of this conditional on self-driving cars really being actually solved, such that an autonomous car is, say, better than the 75% driver on the road.
I expect the overwhelming majority of long-haul (say, >200 miles) passenger transport to happen via planes and trains, just like today.
I do not expect that commute times will be substantially shorter -- indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if they were mildly longer.
I DO expect that people will be able to use their commute time productively (they could work during it and either increase their productivity or decrease their hours) and/or be able to spend less money on transit, because they're using shared vehicles.
I DO expect that short-haul public transportation would suffer a significant decline in ridership, as it would be outcompeted by driverless carss.
I do NOT expect that short-haul public transportation would be entirely killed, it will still have some advantages, especially in very dense areas.
I am agnostic about how wise the investment in autonomous vehicles will end up being -- it depends on how much additional investment is needed to get to this (hypothetical) mode of full self-driving, and to what extent many actors are able to reach full-self-driving at the same time and drive commoditization of self-driving cars. But who cares? It's not my money, this has overwhelmingly been paid for by private actors.
Do you disagree with any of that?
> I DO expect that short-haul public transportation would suffer a significant decline in ridership, as it would be outcompeted by driverless cars.
My contention here is “outcompeted.” Ultimately, this is a policy decision —- at least in the United States. In regions where there is both existing rail and highways, there might be good conditions for a competitive market to exist between the two. But, that competition will also rely on energy pricing and EV availability, as well as policy decisions. As you mentioned, density is a huge factor. However, there’s not sufficient evidence that self-driving cars can solve the congestion that comes with low-density.
In short, there’s far too many factors to make a big prediction about the fate of either at large.
In general, my contention is with those who tout self-driving as a transformative technology that will turn our congested highways into high-speed infra, and all with a higher degree of safety than existing cars. We don’t know any of that.
We do know that short-haul public transportation can work very well.
Judging by HS2 it costs around £200 million per km of track.
And it also costs around £0.5 per mile to use and door to door travel times are generally 2-3x higher on public transport.
Trains are NOT a solution.
there could presumably be large improvements in the ratio of cars to people.
The rest of the developed world didn't shift back to public transport because they enjoy the company of strangers so much, but out of necessity.
Without domestic production of fuel a transport system is vulnerable to fuel price/availability swings.
/s
Except, cars exist. We can go from here to there in absolute comfort, listening to the music we want, stopping exactly where we want. Any solution needs to be faster, cheaper, or easier. Probably all three.
It is insanely easy to say that some abstract “they” should just change their lifestyle for the good of humanity. But the trouble is turning the abstract “they” into the specific “me”. Even if we had the pipe-dream of one mile cities, what if my mile has great sushi, but I want pho? Get on a bus to that mile and then walk? Or just drive to it?
Lastly, we have self-driving cars. They are called taxis. And for most people, the price of a car payment + gas + maintenance + insurance is less than one would spend on a taxi per month. But we still prefer cars. Because they are faster, more comfortable etc.
You either need to force people into your worldview or make the alternative better. The former is a losing strategy, so do the latter.
In both cases someone else is driving for the customer. With a human driver (plus driver assist braking and collision warnings) you have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth driving. With a robotaxi you have something inferior. But maybe it's a lot cheaper, right?
The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage. If you own a car that drives itself, that's a different story. Everybody can see the value proposition.
But is the robotaxi actually cheaper at all? We would have to look at the cost of the hardware (how often do lidars fail and how much do they cost to replace?) and the cost of the software development and the cost of the fallback human remote operators (fleet monitoring and teleoperation) and the years of huge R&D investment (billions of dollars) to evaluate whether a robotaxi fleet is indeed cheaper. So how much cheaper is it, exactly? 5%? 10%? 15%?
As a customer, would you pay a little more to have the most flexible, sophisticated intelligence on Earth (human brain + driver assist) or would you want to save a few dollars and risk having some dumb piece of software strand you in the middle of the road somewhere?
We all use Google Maps or Apple Maps when driving and most of us have seen these systems do boneheaded things. Just imagine the dumb things a robotaxi could do. It's hard for a normal person to be excited about this. I don't know a single person who is excited by robotaxis.
> The robotaxi can only compete on price because that's its only advantage.
That's one advantage. Another is that that it's a third option to the traditional dichotomy of driving yourself or be driven by a stranger.
It's worth taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture. Robotaxis aren't the end-all-be-all for anyone. It's just a bounded problem domain with some promise of commercial profitability on the road to "full autonomy". A baby step, in other words. Yeah, the autonomous vehicles on the road today aren't clearly and obviously better than the best human drivers, but how are they going to get to that point without going through all the intermediate steps to get there?
If you travel to the White House using public transportation with a baby carriage - well, you can't. There is no place to leave it, and they won't let it in. (Same for your purse, or a backpack, or even a water bottle.)
If you take a car you can leave all that in your car. Of course it's not easy finding a place to put your car near the White House. What I did is drive almost all the way, to a parking lot, then take a train for the last couple miles.
They will also be available at 3AM at a medium sized city.
And yeah, that's basically their benefit. That's enough to displace all the human competition, anyway.
3 seconds thought: Robotaxis can't get covid (or warthog-flu or whatever new pandemic the next years will bring), which might be an advantage to some customers.
Having said that, I don't drive nor use taxis, so I don't care much.
> Cruise spokesperson Tiffany Testo provided a written statement that said the company’s vehicles are programmed to pull over and turn on their hazard lights when they encounter a technical problem or meet road conditions they can’t handle.
Well, it should be…
I'm surprised Cruise cars aren't configured to pull over with the server being down (maybe max X seconds of offline driving). Seems better than parking in the middle of a crosswalk/intersection and something that can be done safely offline.