Silicon Valley is wrong about the future of transportation | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley is wrong about the future of transportation

vox.com

18 pointsRickJWagner10 comments

The two most obvious points about this:

1. The space taken up by cars, especially when they're moving at appreciable speeds, is immense. Even a theoretical zero-latency network between all cars to minimize following distance can't get below the threshold of the area the car takes up (and in reality you also can't have perfect utilization because vehicles have to slow for turns with finite radii.) This ceiling on concentration of people is too low to be tenable, and it creates the 'bad party' experience where people want new people to stay away from their places, rather than welcoming the increased market size and collaboration opportunities.

2. In a theoretical world of perfect autonomous vehicles, collisions can be reliably prevented. This creates a conflict which goes one of two ways. Either

a. The cars are programmed to do some arbitrary, low amount of people killing to keep the people scared of stepping in front of cars; or

b. The people will be physically trapped off of streets, as if every street in town were a limited access highway, because otherwise people can (and will) walk into streets with impunity everywhere, grinding all automobile traffic to a halt. This is a continuance of the perversion of public space in the US, where high value conduits for commerce (streets) are given over to cars driving at ever higher speeds.

The ceiling on density imposed by cars needs to be compared to the ceiling on density imposed by people wanting peace and quiet, solitude or space for kids to play or have a BBQ in their own garden space, space for hobbies/sports, and other constraints on density.

If you took away the constraints imposed by cars, I'm not sure that people would be happier cramming together into dramatically denser communities.

In what universe is cars being programmed to kill one of two likely outcomes? The much much much more likely anti-pedestrian dystopia is to extend our current system a bit. Keep the walk signs and red lights. Juice up red light cameras with facial recognition to start automatically writing jaywalking tickets. Take all the cops you've got writing tickets and get them to "patrol" for jaywalking - replacing one revenue source with another

That level of jaywalking enforcement sounds dystopian, no thank you.

>In what universe is cars being programmed to kill one of two likely outcomes?

In the world, already here [0], where driving within safe parameters is considered prohibitive for convenience or fairness reasons.

[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59939536

> Jarrett Walker, who’s a transportation planner, talks about how the problem here is not a technological one, but a geometric one. We only have so much space in our communities in our cities. A new technology doesn’t change that.

Yep. Technology can't solve the inherent space inefficiencies. The flaws are baked in from the premise.

Any improvement in the car is effectively an exercise in continuing to do the wrong thing, but better. It doesn't matter if it's electric or self driving, there are still so many core flaws.

Mr. Marx is kind of in the position of Nokia just before the first IPhone hit. Everything looked rosy for the status quo and Nokia was sure they understood their future for at least ten or fifteen years and probably more.

In a similar vein Mr. Marx is sure that technology won't change anything because cars will stay more or less the same because the tech/auto/lobbyists will make sure it does.

Unfortunately for Mr. Marx the signs of transportation change are all around for those who can read the implications of technology.

Personal motorized transportation can be split into short range, less than 15 miles, and long range trips. Electrification will revolutionize the short range types. ie city cores.

The electrification of vehicles will be different because electric motors scale way better than IC engines. You see them all over, stand up scooters, ebikes, tiny electric cars, and all the way up to huge semi's and beyond. Current IC vehicles have to be big(ish) because their motors don't scale well below about 100hp. Electrics don't have that limitation (not to mention they will be much cheaper)

Another important technical aspect is that electrics in the city will result in the air quality getting much better because electrics don't emit the noxious poisonous gases the IC engines do. The implications are massive and pervasive. Once this becomes apparent IC cars will be banned pretty quickly from city centers.

In the near future then most people will have short range and long range vehicles. The larger long range vehicles will be encouraged not to be in the city centers and this will physically open up more space downtown.

This transition won't be as fast as the iPhone but it is inevitable. The technology is just much much better all around.

> The larger long range vehicles will be encouraged not to be in the city centers and this will physically open up more space downtown.

This wouldn't be a technology driven development though but rather a political one. There's nothing preventing us from limiting cars in our downtowns today. (Seen by the fact that many european cities already do this)

Not to be that person, but I have had this opinion for years now and have received some flak for it. Any movement to increase or bolster the car is misplaced.

> Today, Silicon Valley tech companies are getting into the business of redesigning American urban life, just as auto companies did previously.

This is exactly it. And capitalism will never fix people's actual problems because that's not what it optimizes for.

Entirely this. And, in many ways, SV solutions tend toward the dystopian -- and how self-driving cars are going seems particularly so.

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