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Comment by ChatGTP | Hacker News Reader

It's a ride in a car, it's boring, even if it's driven by GPS and Lidar.

It's a kind of Rube Goldberg contraption for getting around town..... The most complex gizmo possible for the most mundane of tasks.

humans in a nutshell

Am I supposed to get excited each time I get in one or something ?

In a city as hilly as sf getting around in an electric car is a real benefit that saves a great deal of effort. I’d rather have core bus lines that run on 2-3 minute headways instead, but I’ll take what I can get.

I wonder... Could we sort of mix this self driving car technology with an app that does something like Uber pool and put it on buses?

I am not thinking going to a different state. I'm just thinking local public transit. If we have enough buses and assuming there is no rain or snow, passengers just punch in where they want to go and one of the buses takes them there? I feel like there is so much valuable data getting wasted because Uber and Lyft are private companies with no interest in improving public transit. However, I think this data from my hypothetical bus pool could be used to alter bus routes or even to come up with maybe potential metro lines?

I don't see why it needs to be on-demand. Why can't it be a Zoox-sized vehicle that simply goes up and down the street and arrives every minute? If there was a tiny bus that came down every street every minute, not only would that amount to almost zero traffic, it would also be the most brilliant transit service ever deployed. You wouldn't need the app, or even route planning. You only need the driving tech.

This applies best to central cities with a grid layout of course, but that describes San Francisco well enough.

I love this idea. The previous idea had a fatal flaw, you need enough buses that people don't have to wait too long. How many buses is that? I have no idea. However, if you're just going up and down a street, it is now a much easier problem.

For a fictional Manhattan, New York, just for a thought experiment if we assume spherical cows for a minute, lets say there are twelve straight avenues with dedicated lanes. Let's assume each avenue is 13.5 miles long. It takes 40.5 minutes to drive this at 20 miles per hour. That's 81 minutes for a full circle. So if you need a car every minute, that's only 81 cars, right? Does that mean you could service this entire fictional city with just 81*12 or 972 cars?

Something feels wrong though. Like it feels this is too inexpensive, too good to be true. Just my gut reaction. Thoughts?

I don't think you are missing anything. People who stop and do the math are likely to be surprised by the incredible cost of the existing private car traffic system that we tolerate. Every reasonable option is dramatically cheaper.

People may quibble with the constants in that model. Even after eliminating competing private passenger traffic, a hop on/hop off local bus is probably not going to average 20 MPH. It would probably be more like 5-10 MPH.

It's a fair point, it is sad that we will continue to move around 1tn+ of automobile for one person just to go up and down hills :(

Moravec's paradox. The things humans do easily end up being the hardest problems for machines.

Besides, you could call a smartphone a complicated rube Goldberg machine for the purpose of reading text when you could just buy a newspaper instead, but we don't because they're meaningfully different things.

It's a perception thing isn't it? Like you could imagine things for (human, machine) being (easy, easy), (easy, hard), (hard, easy) or (hard, hard). The first category will be taken for granted, and with the last category no one will fault the machine for not being able to do it. That leaves just the two middle ones as being remarkable.

Driving is far from mundane. Operating a multi-ton machine at deadly speeds, surrounded by other human-operated speeding machines, engages most of our senses and requires total concentration. It's a miracle that it works as well as it does, and it's still the most dangerous activity humans perform on a daily basis. We take it for granted everytime we step into a vehicle that we'll make it out alive. The only reason this seems mundane is because of how often we do it.

So, yes, bring on the Rube Goldberg contraption, if it means it can remove the human factor from driving, and make this activity much safer.

Getting the taxi ride is the mundane thing.

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