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Comment by kneebonian | Hacker News Reader

Like I get where this is coming from, but given the UK's history with technology I feel like this will just end up retarding the growth of Self Driving technology in the UK.

Also there's this little gem buried in the bottom of the article

> Lisa Johnson, UK director of public affairs for Starship Technologies, said the company would welcome regulation, ...“There needs to be some sort of national regulation that underpins all decisions because we have invested a lot of time and energy in our safety case. If we don't have regulation, what's to stop somebody coming into the market who isn't as safe as us? ... And we don't want a free for all,” she said.

And there's the push for this, a corporation already in the UK that wants to ensure that there are regulations to "keep people safe" (a.k.a keep competitors out.) and yes I understand regulation can be good and helpful, but regulatory capture can be an insidious b*h

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I would also welcome legislation since their robots operate on public pavements which were originally designed for human beings to safely walk on without having to navigate around motorized vehicles.

I would start with banning these things from all public pavements.

Honest question here, who really wants / needs autonomous cars so badly ?

I feel like this is a real Silicon Valley mission, I’m not so sure the rest of the world gives much of a toss about it?

I guess Silicon Valley would be screaming something about disruption if they would have come with something resembling ETCS. But they did not, so they pretend that trains does not exist.

Over a million people die annually in car accidents. At minimum, their families probably care a fair bit about it so that's quite a lot of people right there.

1. Senior citizens

2. Truckers

3. People reliant on public transport

4. Everyone else on the road who appreciates being alive

5. People who would like less traffic

6. People who drive long stretches in remote areas

7. People wanting to get home from the pub legally and safely at 3am.

You can't do that now?

Many of these people would be better served by having better funded public transit, especially in densely populated areas.

This would 1. help the elderly have more freedom. 3. help people who already use public transport. 4,5. It would make roads safer and allow for less space being used for private vehicles which makes the remaining spaces safer.

Improving intercity and freight rail can also help many people in category 6 who can now do something productive or fun on the train rather than risk driving long distance, and can take some long distance freight off of roads.

The only people who need to have private vehicles are those would live in rural locations, who would still benefit from traveling to a more distant urban area, and people who's jobs demand it such as tradies (trades people). These would all be served by having less people on the roads when they don't need to be.

It would take a non-trivial increase in funding, I bet. Like maybe 5-10 times the funding we have now. Take Portland for example, which has relatively decent public transit for an American city of that size. For any meaningful trip within the city, it takes 2-3x as long on the bus compared to driving a car. They'd have to run a lot more buses to make it competitive. That's expensive.

Replacing the entire fleet of cars with self-driving cars isn't cheap either; so both require a significant investment. So does owning a car for that matter: both in direct car ownership, but also public cost in road maintenance, health care costs, parking lots, etc.

With fewer cars it's a lot easier and cheaper to get quicker and better public transit going. I don't know anything about Portland, but in general going by bus anywhere is mostly waiting in traffic (i.e. cars) instead of actually driving. This is why some places have bus lanes, which do help, but in a limited fashion.

I don't know how it compares exactly, but it's quite complex and there are a lot of factors and I'm not so sure public transport ends up being significantly more expensive in the end.

Trip length has more to do with stops and average speed rather than frequency, that is unless you are making transfers.

Trimet is competitive in downtown once you account for time spent looking for parking. The max is also pretty good when compared to rush hour traffic on the freeways.

Ok, so whilst I have some experience with US cities, this post is about the British regulation on autonomous driving. I can assure you that any substantial increase in local public transport (substantial being 25% or more, this is not a huge amount due to how much has been cut in the past decade.

Intercity transport really needs HS2 pushing through and increase electrification of other routes. This will speed up commuter routes and increase freight capacity.

Public transit doesn't run enough. In Japan, which has one of the most functional train systems in existence, staying out late (and not even very late!) means paying for a hotel room or post-drinking room (they serve you snacks and wash your clothes, etc).

This is in Tokyo.

Public transportation can't replace private vehicles. It can help. It can be useful. It can't replace them. It's like trying to replace traditional powerplants with wind - it doesn't work.

Do you think this problem really matters? There is a whole industry around capsule hotels anyway, I've spent a bit of time in Tokyo and no one is highly inconvenienced from staying out till 3am having a wild time on the town.

If you do get stuck, you do what everyone else does, get one of the probably millions of taxis to drive you home.

Let's face it the taxi driver will at least help you get out of the car :)

Lastly, many people who stay out that late are hammered and probably going to spew in the car, that won't be fun.

The traffic benefits of autonomous vehicles are dubious.

I don’t see how there’s be a significant benefit for people reliant on public transport. If people are stuck on public transport, it’s typically because of cost, and there’s no way a small passenger vehicle is going to beat out a bus or train on that metric.

With a high enough density of automated vehicles cooperating cars can be packed much closer together at speed. The questions are 1) what's that level and can we ever get to it and 2) will we get people to agree to slave their cars to a cooperative scheme like that.

They can hypothetically be packed closer together, however:

- What level of reliability is actually feasible for such a scheme? If you don’t have 5 9s, are you going to be causing catastrophic accidents? Is that level even enough? Even with near instantaneous reaction times and perfect judgement vs humans, you’re still limited by basic physics/stopping distance.

- cars still take up physical space, no matter how close the cars get you eventually run into a flow rate problem. With the addition of self driving cars deadheading to pickups, you’ll also have added traffic volumes from entirely empty vehicles.

Such brigading is unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the capacity of non-limited-access roads (e.g., the street grid of Manhattan). It might help the capacity of highways leading into a city from suburbs or exurbs, but I don't think you'd even practically achieve a 2x throughput bonus at best, and any extra capacity you might add would be meaningless so long as the capacity of the surface streets at the destination is insufficient to handle the extra load.

Add in the extra load of deadheading of self-driving cars, and I strongly doubt that there is any meaningful traffic benefit and in fact there could well be extra traffic costs incurred... and that's before anyone accounts for the effects of induced demand!

Not everything has to be a cure for cancer. Things can just be cool tech.

But autonomous vehicles do solve some real issues as well. Many of the women in my life have full on PTSD about certain aspects of driving. There are days they struggle to get themselves to work. Autonomous vehicles are a drop-in solution for that, with better safety and privacy than Uber/Lyft. Some people would say that better public transit would also solve this, but those people have never done infrastructure advocacy in the US. A moonshot like autonomous vehicles has a genuinely better likelihood of existing for most people in the US than effective public transit.

They're also a potentially safer and more enjoyable solution to the non-joy driving many people do daily. There's no need for those miles to be done by humans who are distracted by other concerns.

Companies also really want it to exist. Pretty much everyone with a large delivery program is in talks with one or more AV companies to automate their shipping. It's going to become a significant part of the industry as soon as the costs are competitive.

> with better safety and privacy than Uber/Lyft.

LOL if you really believe that. Self driving cars will be connected to cloud with camera pointed on you the whole ride. Reasoning for this will be simple - people are pigs without a bit of a care for property of others when they are not supervised

Virtually every Uber already has one or more cameras inside to monitor the passenger. It's even a feature of the driver app to do this with the phone on the dashboard. Companies like Google have far better track records with their internal privacy controls than random Uber drivers and I'm at least somewhat hopeful that US lawmakers will get their act together on regulating the use of the data.

As for safety, have you ever been in an Uber? Waymo at least is already meeting that bar.

I personally don't care about it too much - I'd much rather see greater investment in public transport. But there's some interest in the UK - there's a driverless service across the Forth that keeps popping into the news (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-643...) and I'd be surprised if there wasn't some activity going on in academia around autonomous/driverless

Personally I'd love to be able to just relax on longer road trips rather than driving. Taking the 2 hour trip back to my parent's neck of the woods is much less annoying if I don't have to drive it too.

Let's count how many cars run in worldwide

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