The Driverless Car Revolution Should Not Begin with Cars

Not quite. Long haul trucking has far more things to go wrong than a short jaunt from two packed urban spots to another. A lot goes wrong on these trips. Flat tires, accidents, bad weather and - of course - other drivers.

Case in point: a long haul truck from Oakland to Chicago has to tackle Donner Pass, the Wasatch, Sherman hill (the Wyoming continental divide) and then finally gets a flat stretch across the Great Plains.

I would counter that the best start is short-haul intermodal: trucks that pick up a container and haul it to an intermodal rail yard, and so on. Those trucks have to deal with a short route and much fewer potential problems.

This person has never driven a truck or a bus[1]. The amount of stuff that can go wrong in a truck or bus, plus the amount of damage an error would cause is well above a car.

I think the whole driverless car should have started with smaller-than-car vehicles. I wish they had started with simple package delivery vehicles[2] and learned from them.

1) I did have a bus license in my poorly spent youth

2) something like http://badgerlandminitrucks.com/specs.htm but smaller. Vehicle drives to A, texts, accepts cargo and payment, leaves for B, texts person at B, B verifies ID, door opens, vehicles goes to next site - probably work OK in a city

There will be unforeseen technical issues that are not apparent with a single test car or even small numbers of test cars. There will be accidents, and we'll have lawsuits against Google or other manufacturers. Those will have to play out, so we figure out who is really liable when a driverless car crashes. Trial lawyers will flock to these like sharks to a bleeding fish.

We may get to a point where driverless cars are safer than human-operated cars, and are accepted by the public. I think it's at least 50 years away.

But think about what can happen if you have a system designed to not require a driver at each subway car. You can have smaller cars, called on demand. You don't need to wait for the next car to come. This is especially a benefit during late night hours, when you might have a subway come only every 20 or 30 minutes. This is made worse if you need to transfer.

Once you get cars running along existing lines with small cars, you can eliminate subway lines entirely. Just hop in a subway car, tell it where to go, and it gets you there. No transfers, no thinking of the best lines to take, just get in a car and it'll drop you off at your end location. It would eliminate taxis for many people, which would be one of the reasons this plan would create controversy. Also controversial is elimination of conducting jobs.

I see a few reasons replacing subways will work better than trying to replace cars:

* One organization already owns all the infrastructure for a subway: they can just choose to replace it, and get the laws written for themselves.

* Rails mean you don't have to worry as much about steering, or cars next to you turning into you.

But it could be exploited. If a person walks out in front of a truck, the automated truck better stop. Which an unguarded truck would become easy to rob with little risk. A flat tire would mean the truck calls in for help and is stranded defenseless on the side of the road. That said a fair amount of loss could probably be absorbed with the savings.

I expect long haul truck drivers instead to turn into truck captains. They're present but not for the driving. The truck can drive through the night while they sleep. The captain will handle weigh-ins, emergencies and other road tasks.

Municipalities with a lot of freedom will follow suit. I don't know if american cities will have an easy time fighting with unions, conservatives, taxi drivers, real estate owners.

Why real estate owners? Because once transportation gets optimized, "hot" areas of the city will cool down in prices, compared to other parts of the city.

While that may indeed be true on average, the real challenge in developing production-level driverless tech is properly handling the edge cases. Just because a vehicle may not often have to deal with bicyclists doesn't mean it never has to deal with them.

It made me think that the place to start is the car pool lanes on 101.

Just close them off to humans. Instead, make them available to driverless cars with one addition -- a driverless on-top tow truck.

You drive your existing car on it. Type a destination in on your phone and press GO. It dumps you an one of several exit points.

Ideally, you'd do this with rail instead of roads but that changes it from a tech problem (mostly) for an infrastructure problem (mostly).

i'm not a luddite. i'm just curious how many people will be affected professionally.

[4] "Who will drive adoption?"