Teslas monitor everything – including you [video] from WIRED
youtube.com
youtube.com
DODGE that shit, lasso 'em in!
To write it out for you. It is comically because even a vague statement (like mine) which could be interpreted positively brought on a vicious reaction (like yours). At this point somebody could compliment musks (or trumps which wasn't even part of the discussion) lawn and someone would jump out of the woodworks that they are small brained, childish and also supports supposed bullying.
I didn't react in any sort of mean or cruel way. I'm asking questions and trying to understand context. I'm out of the loop here because I try to avoid bullies IRL.
I never called you small brained. Just trying to understand what compels people to enjoy the misery of others. That's all.
In this particular case, it's the "justice", which is the driving force behind.
"somebody could compliment musks (or trumps which wasn't even part of the discussion) lawn and someone would jump out of the woodworks that they are small brained, childish and also supports supposed bullying"
Musk has been actively trying to destroy America, so I understand why people have knee jerk reactions to him and Trump.
> Maybe now that people are comically angry at musk they at least act like they care.
Doesn’t just imply, but within its context directly states that people are mad at Elon for reasons unrelated to Tesla software (hence the “now”).
The rule is “strongest possible interpretation” not “invent a much less plausible but much more generous interpretation”. If you interpret that rule the way you’re suggesting it could be rewritten as “Trolls and bad faith posters only exist in your head, not on the internet”
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
These may in fact be two different subsets of "people"
e.g. I bought a Land Rover Defender because it is the closest thing to an "open source" vehicle. However you are giving up many modern conveniences and you will be doing a lot of work yourself.
It seems obvious that people are basically being brainwashed by technology.
The story is the massive corruption and waste in the government. But this brainwashing turns the thought into ELON == BAD so government waste == good.
I feel like everyone I interact with at this point is borderline retarded.
Maybe Trump will break it beyond repair and we'll have a revolution or something. Seems extremely unlikely. People are literal thought and wage slaves, so there's no potential for that unless the Ministry of Truth demands it.
This is not the story. The story is that the massive waste in the government is being used as an excuse to destroy whole agencies regardless of whether they are useful or wasteful. While at the same time handing over access to ALL of the most sensitive data to unelected third party who most certainly acting in his own, and the country's, best interest. This is the 'massive corruption' that you should be worried about.
I hope this whole row will make people just a bit more aware. But it's hard to say how much it will help. An average person is powerless when seeing "Connect to Wi-Fi to complete setup" on their screen - whether it's their new TV set or a new laptop.
you need a faraday cage to prevent any signal from getting in or out; but that's not the goal here.
this is more like sticking a piece of tape on your laptop camera.
Electric buses make rides pretty cheap and comfortable. And shifting traffic from personal cars to buses would make mobility much more efficient. Because in a bus, 30 people can cross a crossing so much faster than in a line of 30 individual cars.
Would privacy also be better? Because the government is more trustworthy regarding the collection of movement data than private companies?
But at the end it pays off. Full privacy, free workouts, faster commute, being outside (getting sun, maybe fresh air).
Invest in a good bike (maybe even eletric bike) and commute faster :)!
So true, weather is an issue (but in a way it's fun to now look at the sky to see where the clouds are going), clothing too a bit. My only problem is that weak health quickly cut your ability to move far.
Bikes have been around for a long time and are expected to technically stay the same in the foreseeable future.
Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise. Makes it much more suitable to relax or do some work on your phone. Plus, the cost (manufacturing+maintenance+fuel) of electric buses is 25% lower than the cost of gasoline buses. At the moment, only 10% or so of buses are electric. So the effect of these two improvements are mostly still to hit the market.
And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous. Which reduces the costs of a bus operation by 70%.
Imagine we get autonomous electric buses with nice seats and tables. Then you can do your work in a bus while getting from A to B super cheap. Mobility would be so different.
You might have missed the electric bike revolution that started a few years ago? Probably half the bikes I see here (in Flanders) are electric. It has enabled many people who would never have considered it before to start biking.
And bikes are absolutely taking market share from cars here. Honestly I don't even understand why enough people still use their cars through my city instead of biking. It easily takes 2x or 3x the time to get anywhere.
I am an ex-avid cyclist. Bikes are easily stolen, You can get soaked if the weather is poor, If it is bitterly cold it can literally take you hours to warm up (especially if you are older). If you have to ride in traffic it can be very frightening especially if you haven't done it before. Other people find cycling simply uncomfortable, I've been told it more uncomfortable for women.
Yeah you need to adapt to weather. But a good pair of biking pants, rain cover for the shoes, thick leather gloves and different pairs of coats (which you anyway need) usually do the job.
If your bike is super uncomfortable there is tons of different sattles and options. Even bike fitting to fit your bike perfectly to your body.
> I use a decent U lock. Always lock the frame to something metal and solid. Additionally I have a ~100USD insurance to cover my several thousand dollars bikes. Never got stolen any.
You are lucky. I've had two bikes stolen. I ride a very old and battered looking mountain bike (Marin Hawk Hill 97). My anti-theft measure is that it isn't worth stealing.
> If your bike is super uncomfortable there is tons of different sattles and options. Even bike fitting to fit your bike perfectly to your body.
If you haven't cycled in years it is just painful on backside and your nether regions. I hadn't cycled in over a year and I was saddle sore for about two days afterwards. I was expecting it btw. The bikes I have fit me perfectly, I use a good saddle (roll).
Generally people buy the cheapest POS bike from a store, the fitting probably isn't right or they just get their friends bike that they no longer want and put up with it until they can afford a car. They aren't going to a proper bike shop to get fitted up.
Now my bikes don't get stolen anymore in Flanders (even though I use a much cheaper and more convenient frame lock).
About the weather, I just wear warm clothes. I'm about ten minutes away from my children's school, not 2 hours. It rarely gets lower than -5°C though (23°F).
It also works because we have decent cycling infrastructure so cars don't kill too many cyclists.
I'm not an avid cyclist or an avid automobilist but I sometimes have to drive the same route by car and I have never wished I was in a car rather than in a bike including under rain, while the other way around is almost every time.
The bikes I had stolen would be about €2000 today. I ride a second hand mountain bike that is old and isn't a target for thieves.
> About the weather, I just wear warm clothes. I'm about ten minutes away from my children's school, not 2 hours. It rarely gets lower than -5°C though (23°F).
I am in North of England. The temperature itself frequently isn't the problem. It is the wind chill factor. You can literally feel it chill your bones. I have fenders on all my bikes and tbh that reduces how wet you get by about 30-50% but affects the bikes handling a lot IME.
If your city has nice green public spaces linked by bike lanes, and has a good “human” level of density where most of the stuff you actually want to go to are reachable in less than an hour of cycling, people will naturally gravitate towards that, since biking in green spaces is usually enjoyable in and of itself.
Paradoxically this makes driving nicer as well, since it frees up traffic for car enthusiasts.
When I was living in Sofia (Bulgaria) I used to bike a lot, just because it is nice. And I did own a car and used it frequently. But my commute / grocery run / recreation was usually done by cycle.
* Theft. I have to carry a lock and cable (for the front wheel). These are heavy and get dirty.
* Storage. I have to haul my mountain bike up and down the stairs in my apartment. Additionally I can't put the bike on my right shoulder and I cannot carry things on my left as it "feels wrong". So the whole process is a PITA.
* Being run over and accidents. I've been hit by cars hard enough twice to send me in and out of hospital for months. I had other less minor collisions with cars. I do not like cycle lanes either because there is even more chances of collision (read below).
* I am also normally dodging people's dogs and/or children while on a cycle even on the "cycle" lanes. This makes any cycle frustrating.
* Cycling has intertwined itself with the insufferable green crowd. I used to enjoy cycling for the act itself, I am not naive enough to think I am saving the planet.
Is that so? The insufferable green crowd is also pro public transportation, is that a reason to have an issue with trains?
I actually prefer working on and driving my 97 LandRover Defender these days and Making Youtube Videos.
Would you be happy to be associated with aristocracy, now that you drive a land rover, because many "old money" people drive those?
While in your first comment you gave lots of reason why you dont ride a bike, now youre saying you stopped mostly due to perception of others..thats to me just as silly as all the tesla drivers who are now oh so afraid to be associated to musk and going so far to putting stickers on their car claiming they didnt know musk is unhinged.
BTW it was a form of transport to me. I used to cycle everyday to work and I used to cycle after work and at the weekends.
When I say it was infected by the green crowd, I am not including people that simply use it as a means of transport. I would have thought that would be obvious.
I am talking generally about cycling as a whole. I got into it because I thought mountain biking was cool when I was 12. Now almost every discussion about it is about building whole cities around it, carbon emissions etc. That is pushed by people primarily by people in the green crowd. I used to personally know these people. I probably still have their email and phone numbers hanging about.
There are a lot of extremists in the cycling the movement that want to totally ban cars, think pet ownership is akin to slavery and they are very vocal and some are involved in planning transport infrastructure. I know this for a fact, because I used to know these people personally.
You only think this is all silly because you haven't encountered these people.
> Would you be happy to be associated with aristocracy, now that you drive a land rover, because many "old money" people drive those?
Most Defenders are driven by Farmers I would wager. You are confusing a Defender with a Range Rover. Defenders are very bare bones, mine doesn't even have a Radio. I also have no issue with the aristocracy. They don't interfere with my hobbies or my life in any meaningful way. In fact many of them that I have met are very nice.
> While in your first comment you gave lots of reason why you dont ride a bike, now youre saying you stopped mostly due to perception of others..thats to me just as silly as all the tesla drivers who are now oh so afraid to be associated to musk and going so far to putting stickers on their car claiming they didnt know musk is unhinged.
To clarify, it was a combination of all the reason I listed. You are focusing in on this particular issue because you took exception to it.
The primary reason is one I didn't list (as it was only relevant to myself). I am in my early 40s now. My left ankle has issues, my right knee has issues. My right shoulder is slightly deformed from breaking my collar bone 3 times. When I was run over (the second time), I broke all my fingers on my right hand, some of the fingers didn't set correctly. I don't want to go through that in my 40s again and the roads are less safe than they were 15 years ago.
As for the Musk stuff. I believe it is largely astro-turf'd on the net. If people wish to sell their Tesla or adorn it with Anti-Musk slogans because of his current involvement with the Trump Administration, they are free to do so. I see nothing unhinged about it at all.
If they were to engage in acts of vandalism or violence because of anti-Tesla sentiment that would be unhinged IMO.
> When I say it was infected by the green crowd, I am not including people that simply use it as a means of transport. I would have thought that would be obvious.
Sorry but nothing in your comment made that obvious. It seems you are the one who is conflating cyclists with the "insufferable green crowd" (why caring about the environment is insufferable is a question for another time). People ride the bike for all kinds of reasons, they are quicker, they help them excercise, they help them save money, they simply enjoy it.
> You only think this is all silly because you haven't encountered these people.
I live in berlin, I know this kind of extremism very well, and still would never dream to judge cyclists as a whole - because i know it's just a means of transport that both "good" and "shitty" people use.
> the roads are less safe than they were 15 years ago.
Maybe that's because there are many many more cars on the road than in the past, population is rising everywhere. For everyone to have a car is simply not sustainable, especially in cities.
Buses are subsidized. In cities with subways, they are used primarily to accommodate people with limited mobility or to cover rare routes. Between cities, they remain the cheapest option. Therefore, I'm not sure that cost is an important factor.
[0] https://inkspire.org/post/amsterdam-was-a-car-loving-city-in... [1] https://www.paris.fr/en/pages/bicycles-outperform-cars-in-pa... [2] https://english.kimnet.nl/publications/publications/2018/04/...
Not in a society that is car-centric. But in countries that optimize for different types of transport, it is quite busy with bikes. Every commuter bike would have been a car otherwise - so also taking much more space.
Probably half the urban bikes I see now are (mostly cheap) electric ones. There's also a question of infrastructure; many cities have made great improvements in bike lanes over the last few decades.
> Electric buses are so much better than gasoline buses. Fewer vibrations, less noise.
Also faster takeoff, which is quite important (urban bus routes are typically very stop-start-y).
> And in a few years, buses will start to become autonomous.
I have doubts.
(Buses are very big and heavy, and other road users tend to behave badly around them; they're a near-worst-case for automation. You might get away with it on a mostly-segregated BRT line, but not a conventional bus route.)
On this topic, I think public/private ownership, and public/private usage, makes no difference either way.
Public transport can be privately owned. Back in the UK, the majority of busses I saw were Stagecoach[0].
But even when government owned, that doesn't remove the argument in favour of CCTV: here in Berlin we have BVG[1], which is government owned, and I'm fairly sure the blobs I see on the ceiling are CCTV cameras[2].
I think what does make a difference is rules like GDPR — but cookie popups have shown that it's an uphill struggle to force businesses to actually follow that law rather than demand "consent" before doing business, or to actually minimise their usage of tracking to the level where "legitimate interest" actually applies and therefore they don't need to ask (as opposed to the IMO wishful thinking "legitimate interest" used by some cookie popups).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach_Group
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Verkehrsbetriebe
[2] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/rechtsstreit-mit-sitz-des...
IF the default handling of any recordings is total erasure after some specified (and not unreasonable) period, then it's not an unleavened evil is it ?
The recordings may be gone, but is all metadata? And when they answer yes, does that also mean "partners" too?
Anyhow, public transport will always be less private than a car, just due to fewer people traveling with you. That's not the point though.
The point is, car companies spying on you. And they all do it too. Ford does it. It needs to be stopped.
But I'd like to think the items on your list become more visible - and easier to combat - if recordings are time-limited. Can activists conceivably use FOIA requests to identify ALL dataflows out of surveillance systems in use in public commons ?
Maybe that's just in my jurisdiction.
It works somewhat ok
Though, I can freely film you from a public area.
There you said it! But, if you cannot control the software, then it's not your hardware.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-20810-7_...
No doubt many people are aware that card passes are potential trackers, and that may be why a third or so of the ridership pays no fare.
Nearly every business has cameras. More and more residential homes have porch cameras pointed at the street. Even if your vehicle isn't monitoring you, it has a license plate hanging off the back so it can be easily identified. We're all being tracked by our phones, and everybody else's phone will be used against you should you be caught acting weird in pubic. There are records of me in more databases than what's even knowable, the plot is so lost. We're back to being naked all the time, except now without the privilege of knowing who is looking at you.
I felt like people rallying against surveillance and tracking were beating a dead horse 20 years ago and I feel even more that way today.
Less than some people assume. I've seen people eat boogers while waiting for a green light.
I remember reading about someone who had to track down incidents on the many interior bus cameras.
It must be possible to buy a ticket that has at least one of the following properties:
1. It is not linked to the times when you use it (flat-rate/monthly ticket). Payment may be linked to your name.
2. It is not linked to your identity (pseudonymous numeric ID). Payment must not be linked to your name.
Otherwise it's easy to track when you travel which route.
And obviously, facial recognition must be forbidden.
Daily/weekend/weekly are even better, and monthly/quarterly even while they tied to your name, don't have to be validated in any particular place at all. You can do it far from any vehicles.
That said, I don't think you can ever replace individual traffic. It is only possible in the most dense cities. Otherwise bus travel is too slow and unreliable for people working 40h+.
bus travel is too slow
and unreliable
people working 40h+
FWIW, that's a _tiny_ bus. Typical city buses take 80-100 people, articulated buses about 150. At peak time on important routes they'll generally be mostly full.
The major capacity limit on buses is stopping. On busy systems at peak times, you'll tend to get clumping at stops, as similar routes line up one after another.
city buses take 80-100 people, articulated buses about 150
I have took an extensive look at this over the last weeks. A typical articulated bus can only carry about 20 to 30 passengers who are seated as comfortably as in a private car.
Partly that is because of the design of the buses. If the buses were redesigned to comfortably seat people, they could probably carry an additional 10 or 20 passengers who are comfortably seated.
Oh, I missed that point. I mean, personally I'd say that any bus offers a better ride than driving a car, in that you do not have to _drive_ the thing, but tastes differ, of course.
Ideally most urban bus routes would be short enough that healthy people can comfortably use them without sitting.
Realistically, the costs of operating a bus are pretty fixed, and bus networks have hard space-based caps on capacity (as I mention elsewhere stops in particular are a problem), so the priority will always be on getting as many people in the space as possible. It's hard to see why any public transport authority would do seating-only urban buses; it would degrade the system as a whole, and the ticket price would be unreasonably high.
Most people, also, will care more about "can I actually get on the bus for my 20 minute journey" than "if I get on, will I have a comfy seat", which tends to indicate a mostly-standing design with seating available for elderly and disabled people.
As an example, take my local system. Dublin's main bus system has about 1,300 buses in operation; almost all of these are double-deckers with a capacity of 90-100 people. The system is pretty much limited by availability of drivers. Fares are 2 euro for a 90 minute journey (or where the last leg of the journey is started within 90 minutes of the first one). Adopting your system, we'd need five times as many buses, so for a start we'd need 6,500 buses, along with maybe 15,000 drivers and another 5,000 or so support staff. It's hard to see how that could happen without dramatically increasing the cost. But also, at peak times, major bus corridors are full of buses, and major bus stops have buses queueing up. It would simply not be reasonable to 5x this.
why any public transport authority would do seating-only urban buses
The average car costs €300/month. Plus about the same amount of opportunity costs, missed by having to control the steering wheel for about an hour per day.
A public transport flatrate in Germany is only €59.
Seems like there is a huge gap in the middle for a better bus experience.
It would not degrade the system but wastly improve it. Because the buses would be additional buses. Each bus taking over 100 cars of the road. A bus can carry over 20 passengers and drive over 10 hours per day. While the average car ride carries 1.1 passengers or so and the car is only used 1 hour per day or so.
For instance the Paris Metro system used to have a first class carriage, until I think the late 80s.
And this would actually be worse, because you'd be talking about separate, likely less frequent buses. Most people will just get on the first thing that comes along, unless it's more expensive.
In general, on transport, people will pay a premium for speed; _express_ bus routes can charge a premium. For instance going to the airport I can take the city bus system for 2 euro and take over an hour (I'm on the wrong side of the city) or an express service that takes 20 minutes but costs 8 euro. I take the express one, and so do enough other people that it stays in business. And they'll pay for better seating for _long_ journeys. But 'long' appears to mean "at least an hour" and possibly "at least two hours".
(Semi-anecdotal evidence of this; in Ireland, a small country where most rail journeys not involving a transfer are <2 hours, first class _used_ to be a thing on trains, but it has been withdrawn from all services except Dublin-Belfast (2 hours) and Dublin-Cork (2.5 hours) because people simply weren't using it. You also see this with air travel; non-budget airlines have been cutting non-economy seating on short routes for years because it's hard to sell.)
If we double the number of buses, we can increase the number of seats per bus and still have a higher overall passenger capacity in the city.
In my city, I see buses that have only seated places all the time:
It is an interesting mix of a private and public service. Mostly it is used by people who prefer a better ride experience than on a public bus. And are fine with paying a much higher price per ride. They pay out of their own pocket to the service provider, Volkswagen. But for people with disabilities, using the Moia buses is free and paid by the city.
As mentioned, in a large bus system, the logistical challenges of doubling the number of buses would be formidable, and would likely lead to overall service degradation.
Are people paying for the _seats_, here, though, or for the more direct route? (AIUI it's a hybrid bus-taxi sort of thing where it only stops where people have indicated they want to be dropped off/picked up on an app). Like, if it was all-seats but operated on a normal bus route, I doubt people would pay for it.
I'd also question how sustainable it is; as far as I can see it's basically an experiment by VW, and likely a subsidised one. It feels like one of these things being prepped in case self-driving vehicles ever work properly. And in any case the scale is _tiny_; apparently a ridership of 11 million ever.
This is a simplification, and there's definitely wiggle room within those categories (for instance, there exist tram lines which are higher capacity than many metro lines, mostly through the use of extremely long tramsets) but _basically_ how it works; buses can only take you so far, capacity-wise.
I would think that as long as there are cars on the road, each new bus is a net positive, as it replaces 100 cars.
For me, knowing that the bus/tram is probably going to be packed and I won't be able to find a seat is a very good reason to try and find a different route/mode of transport, especially if I'm carrying something. I know that some people don't mind, but I really do, even though I'm young and reasonably fit. I'd rather sit down for 35 minutes than stand up for 20.
I think electric vehicles are such a clear win for pollution (air and sound pollution) in cities that rolling back to ICEs should be clearly justified.
Of course, the trouble is, sometimes the new thing is just bad. A commuter/metro train system in my city operates mostly on 40 year old rolling stock. In 2000, some new trainsets were introduced, from two different manufacturers. One model never really worked properly, and was scrapped in 2008; the other survived. The whole thing is now due to be replaced with shiny new trains, starting this year... hopefully these ones work.
You'd _think_ this wouldn't happen, because reliability is absolutely the number one thing that operators care about, and they're usually willing to pay a premium to get it (the alternative being to pay to keep their reliable 40 year old units in service). But the industry's surprisingly bad at delivering it.
This feels like a very US mindset.
In many other places buses are very reliable and cities are built around them e.g. dedicated bus lanes and so they are often much faster than driving.
So many americans are seemingly utterly ignorant of their own history and then use that ignorance to insist "It can't happen here"
Go read up on the tram systems we used to have.
Sure, when said metro areas were a 10th of their current size with a couple orders of magnitude fewer residents street cars were kind of a thing. You cannot credibly expect a similar system to service the suburban sprawl around Atlanta for example. So unless the plan is to dragline the suburbs and mulch 80% of the urban population this is a complete non-starter. The sheer number of routes and volume of equipment required to service them would be financially prohibitive.
Living in a bike-oriented city, I think e-bikes are the future. Almost as versatile as cars, with none of the downsides.
In Oslo (and I am sure other European places), the answer is simply "because I want to spend 30 minutes on my commute instead of 90 minutes". (At least for train/metro)
Assuming urban areas: Roads are always congested. Building more roads/more lanes only relieves it a few years then car traffic increases until you are as congested as before. (You can find proper scientific studies of this effect -- "induced traffic")
But public transport, if enough people take it, take so ridiculously many more passengers per area of road that it cuts through this effect and actually helps congestion. (Establishing a bus route may also induce more traffic, but you can add another bus much more cheaply than another road lane, and actually keep up.)
This requires buses to be prioritized in traffic though (dedicated lanes), otherwise there is as you point out no reason for individuals to take public transport.
Basically a reserved bus/metro lane gives you "infinite road capacity" (with the obvious caveats)
This is why real estate close to metro is significantly more expensive than further away from metro.
> Basically a reserved bus/metro lane
Yes
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Night buses are a thing. A city / urban area large enough to have concerts at 2AM should be able to support a set of them running one or two per hour with a 15 minutes’ walk to the closest stop. (There’s a tradeoff between convenience and empty buses, and night buses are there more to make sure nobody gets stuck.)
> should
But it doesn't.
Hmm, last week I was out til about 4am on Friday night, then got a 24 hour bus home. That's what I generally do when I'm out late.
> This means you need some personal vehicle anyway
Unless you're not drinking at this 2am concert, you're probably not using a personal car.
Buses are actually quite _good_ for this use case, in that they're much cheaper to run 24/7 than trams and heavy rail (whose higher capacity is largely useless late at night, and, particularly in the case of heavy rail, really _need_ maintenance downtime).
Your math is leaving out a lot of other waiting periods which makes it seem like buses save time over cars. Your focus on crossing intersections is distorting the calculations.
Yes, 1 bus can move 30 passengers through a traffic light is faster than 30 individual cars but you have to offset that savings with extra wait times in other places:
+ add additional time to travel to the bus stop
+ add additional time to wait at the bus stop because buses don't come on demand but at spaced intervals. Maybe once an hour or half hour.
+ add additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops that are not relevant to the passenger, or changing buses,
+ add additional time to account for the bus taking a longer convoluted route that deviates from the shortest path between points A and B because they have to accommodate for the bus stops and also optimize the # of buses in the fleet vs passenger counts.
+ add time to travel from the final bus stop dropoff point to travel to the final destination without the bus. Each mile of walking takes about ~20 minutes. If the bus stop is too far away from the destination office or house, then I guess the passenger can take an Uber ride? Not only does that add more time, it negates a lot of benefits of using the bus. People could use the Uber for the entire trip -- or just use their personal car.
There are scenarios where the bus is undeniably faster. Inside dense cities where they have special lanes that can bypass some gridlock. The tour buses with stops that have frequent pickup intervals that do continuous loops around cities for tourists is another example that's faster than cars.
add additional time to travel to the bus stop
add additional time to wait at the bus stop
additional time for bus to stop at other bus stops
additional time to account for the bus taking a route
that deviates from shortest path
I mean, this is enormously dependent on how busy the route or routes is. A once an hour route is _very_ infrequent. Every 10 minutes isn't unusual at peak times and of course multiple routes may work for you. I sometimes go for a drink with friends on the other side of the city after work; at rush hour, there's an almost continuous stream of suitable buses.
Yes, it depends on the city. In Atlanta GA, the MARTA bus stops have 40-minute wait intervals outside of peak times. In Missoula Montana, the bus stop interval is 1 hour on Saturdays and Sundays. https://mountainline.com/your-trip/maps-schedules/
In the USA away from dense downtowns, using a public bus can be 4x the total commute time of a personal car when adding in all the extra wait times and the extra non-bus travel times to get to-and-from the bus stops. A 30-minute commute by car that takes 2 hours by public bus isn't appealing to most Americans.
The layout & logistics of American lifestyles favors the car. At any Costco parking lot, you can see soccer moms loading up the SUV with a ton of groceries and toilet paper. Trying to haul all that on a public bus would not be convenient. (The other passengers would also be annoyed by that extra baggage taking up space.) And drivers also like listening to music in their private cars.
In the USA, the more realistic consumer preference change would be replacing private personal cars with public robot driverless cars. Americans could then keep most of their lifestyle without drastic changes while the fleet of driverless cars reduces the space for parking and the pollution.
Yeah, okay, wow, that's really bad. Only place in the US I've ever used the bus was San Francisco (and its immediate surroundings), which is, I suppose, a bit of a special case, as American cities go (it was worse than the buses I'm used to in terms of frequency, but not _dramatically_ worse).
> The layout & logistics of American lifestyles favors the car.
This is true to some extent, but I would wonder how much of it is chicken-and-egg; people avoid the public transport because, as you've mentioned, it is _unusably bad_ (I wouldn't consider 1/hour acceptable except for late-night or rural services). As I understand it, in NYC, for instance, which has acceptable public transport, people _do_ use it.
> At any Costco parking lot, you can see soccer moms loading up the SUV with a ton of groceries and toilet paper. Trying to haul all that on a public bus would not be convenient.
Grocery delivery is a thing (actually, my impression is that it's less common as a first-party thing in the US; I'm not entirely sure why). And of course even in less car-dependent countries people often do use cars for _that_ sort of thing.
> And drivers also like listening to music in their private cars.
I mean, this would have made sense as a justification at one time (I think way back in the day this was actually used as a selling point by car companies), but come on, now, the walkman came out in 1979 (even before that, the transistor radio with earphone was a thing). I'm 40 and have been listening to music on public transport all my life.
how much public transit have you used in the US? in NYC, busses are somehow even worse than the subway. in SF, same kind of story.
I'll choose to walk, bike or taxi to avoid the implementation of public transit we have.
And an awful lot of SmartTrip cards are registered with WMATA, people use Apple Wallets, etc. But then a lot of people simply don't pay.
There are cameras on many or all buses, too.
Sure, US cities have mostly (1) been designed as far away from anything that is not the individual car as possible, and now it's very difficult to come back. But at least Americans could pretend they are aware of the fact that cities can be built in such a way that public transports actually work.
(1) Because there are cities, like NYC, where it actually works!
It's bad enough as it is, and consumers should try and fight against that by not buying those cars.
Especially now that we see that the CEO can turn fascist and feel entitled to do whatever he pleases with the data. How long before federal employees get fired because their Tesla showed that they arrived late to work?
At the very least, don't buy Teslas. At this point that's probably one of the riskiest choices.
Which surely has some connection to why Musk (like many other Silicon Valley billionaires) hates the EU so much.
Things tend to get demonstrably worse before it gets better. SIGH
Also, whether people choose to do the right thing is less interesting if they have no choice.
American's believe we're exceptional and dont have to learn from others. We'll do it OUR WAY and it'll work. We'll force it if we have to. This isn't something most people are consciously aware of, but it's something you can notice if you start to look for.
They aren't laughing.
On the contrary, the surveillance capitalists (many of which frequent this site) are vocal because they are spreading FUD. After all, sensible data protection laws affect their business models.
Now we have to worry about the government AND the big tech companies AND their crazy CEOs as the lines get blurred between the three.
People were worried about Google in the early 2000s, after they bought doubleclick. There's nothing new here, except a continuous walk along the same path.
Data collection was a big trend of the 80s. Credit bureaus and points cards were the big start.
If you go into a forum about cars, you can see people asking about 5 or 6 years ago, to turn off telemetry in their cars. They are mocked relentlessly.
Then the insurance issue came to light, where car companies were caught selling data without consent. Suddenly, everyone cared.
Point is, the average person hasn't the time, or the inclination to understand, or even care... until it hurts them.
Of course, by the time the hurting happens, it's too late...
So give them pennies (point cards) and they'll be happy to be tracked.
From what I've noticed in my life, many people are incapable of being aware of dangers, without perspective. Thus, to survive mentally, they must dismiss dangers they cannot control. They deride concerns, to protect themselves menrally.
I'd say at least 50% of the population is like this.
How do you propose these driverless / driver assist systems work?
I want my car to monitor both me and the surroundings. I also want to be able to do things like speak in natural language to my phone, use my phone camera to OCR and translate documents from a foreign language, and all sorts of other 90s sci-fi stuff.
Unfortunately the future we were graced with is a dystopian reality where all of this is built on proprietary black boxes that spy on you 24/7. And somehow the government takes no issue with this state of affairs, instead constructing their own data feeds.
This cracks me up. You're only saying that because he's vocal, and you're aware of him daily.
After all, I don't see people commenting on the other 1M CEO, nor aware of what they're doing right now, which do not post on X.
Being vocal is one thing but constantly attacking someone on x while spreading misinformation or straight up lies doesn't add to ones credibility either.
[1]: https://au.pcmag.com/cars-auto/107185/ford-patents-in-car-ad...
[2]: https://fortune.com/2025/02/13/jeep-in-car-ads-popup-stellan...
I, for one, find it weird.
I use Apple’s homekit secure video thing and the cameras are only set to record when nobody is home. Otherwise they are basically powered on 24/7.
I guess it is weird but I kind of forget that they are there.