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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#281

Post by burlesona »

dwighttk wrote: post #199
burlesona wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this conversation is not for you or your family. The car is the second best thing that ever happened to rural life, after the tractor, and nothing is going to change that. This conversation is about the 62% of Americans that live and work in 3.5% of the land area. (Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33.... ) There’s no reason for rural America to act like these ideas are…

Oh, that's not offensive. FWIW those 62% live in "incorporated paces" or cites, which would include my town (as long as I'm understanding that correctly.) Down under "new incorporated places" it mentions Sandy Point, TX, population 200. It's crazy that even including little towns like that you're still only talking about 3.5% of the land.

Yeah it truly is crazy.

I think it also speaks to how relatively solvable some of the urban problems are in the sense that we could be intentionally building new cities (not just attached suburbs) if we wanted to, and that would - if it worked - take some of the pressure off the places that are struggling right now.

For whatever reason America just stopped doing that after WW2. Maybe it’s time to start again?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#282

Post by 100ideas »

photos_victim wrote: post #189
100ideas wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone have back-of-the-napkin estimates of total passenger throughput for central public transportation vs ride share transportation for any metropolitan area? If public transit i.e. Muni serves 10x or 100x riders each day vs ride sharing than I see your point... I think. Wait. Maybe you could spell it out?

Don't bother with napkins. The data is open. TNC trips average about 150k / weekday [1], BART carries about 415k trips / weekday [2], and Muni carries about 750k [3]. Thus, public transportation carries about 8x more people, with the caveat that not all BART journeys start or end in SF. On the other hand, 99% of vehicle trips in SF are either private cars or TNCs. Neither of these was my point, though. My point was t…

The reason I brought this up was to wonder how insane (just a little? or totally impossible?!) it would be if 100% of public transportation was serviced by "TNCs" in the city.

> "On an average weekday, more than 5,700 TNC vehicles operate on San Francisco streets during the peak period"[sfcta.org/tncstoday]

So if TNCs provide ~30 trips a day, and all 1,165,000 MUNI+BART passengers switched to TNCs, there would have to be an additional ~40k TNC vehicles in the city :).

Maybe it would work if they were really, really small.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#283

Post by ArchTypical »

andrewaylett wrote: post #219
beat wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cite?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/15/britains-safest-... for example: "no drivers or passengers killed inside it in the 16 years it has been on sale", with 50k sold in the UK.

> no drivers or passengers killed inside it

To be fair, nobody has been killed inside any driverless car either.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#284

Post by tim333 »

jimmy1 wrote: post #152
Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

> Driverless cars are coming along just fine. I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong. > This is mostly about sensors and geometry. And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses…

> yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong.

There's some video here for:

>“The Yandex.Taxi autonomous car safely navigated the streets of Moscow after a recent snowstorm managing interactions with traffic, pedestrians, parked vehicles and other road hazards on snowy and icy streets,” https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/16/17020096/self-driving-car...

Presumably it's not perfect but it seems to be coming along. Snow and ice covered Moscow is more adverse than what I usually drive.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#285

Post by alistairSH »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #240
alistairSH wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as good as Germany or DC. Did you just claim DC public transit is good? Wow. Coherent bus lines are few and far between. Light rail is non-existent. And the Metro is falling apart at the seems... Prone to excessive delays. Entire lines are brought down for extended periods to perform decades of deferred maintenance. There's no ring routes - to get from Dulles to Rockville, you have to go all the way downtown and…

It's easy to buy a card, and get on the right track. Your day to day minutia is of little concern to people that just need to get on and get somewhere.

Except when the train isn’t running at all. Or the rail catches on fire. Both of which are shockingly common.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#286

Post by pacaro »

100ideas wrote: post #166
jazzyjackson wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the part that drives me crazy - America HAD electric railroads all over the place. Or at least Illinois (my homestate) did. You can look up 'Illinois InterUrban' and see maps of rails connecting every rural city. Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the…

Freight traffic dominates the utilization of the rail network in the US and is prioritized over other traffic. Freight trains travel slowly. This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe. > The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percen…

I also wonder how much population density has to do with this. The distances that freight is moved over in the US seem far greater than in Europe. The same applies to people, rail travel is much more available/popular in the denser parts of the US, but for the west coast (for example) the useful stops are fairly far from each other, Seattle and Portland are relatively close at about 170 miles, but then its another 600 miles to Sacramento, or 680 to San Francisco. Even with (I wish) high speed rail, those are long journeys. Of course you can have long train journeys in Europe too, but there really aren't any sizable destinations between Portland and Sacramento (sorry Salem, Eugene, Redding).

I guess it feels like the distances involved in the US are more advantageous to freight, and in the EU are more advantageous to passengers

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#287

Post by dv_dt »

djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

I suspect that if someone could deliver a fully autonomous car at say 2x the cost of a regular car, the next immediate problem would be massive autonomous traffic jams where you would still need mass transit to work back scaling costs on the transport networks.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#288

Post by monocularvision »

tomp wrote: post #195
pkulak wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one thinks that you just hook up ML to a camera and you're done. Literally everyone working on this only uses ML for identification. When that Model X crashed into a highway divider, it was because the lines on the road were very faint and there was a fork in the line that actually wasn't the _real_ lane line. The car followed that by mistake, but only because of the misidentification of the lane line. How are mor…

> It was designed for binocular vision Does binocular vision even matter at such distances (i.e. beyond a few meters)? I thought it was only effective for relatively close objects.

As evidenced by my username, I can say confidently that you are correct. The depth perception gained from two eyes is only good at very close ranges and doesn’t play a big factor in most driving situations.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#289

Post by pacaro »

ntsplnkv2 wrote: post #270
Shivetya wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

municipal rail is a money sink. currently across the nation there is over a hundred billion dollars of deferred maintenance on municipal rail; light and heavy. worse bus service tends to suffer because they try to force people to use rail by making bus service less attractive which in effect is just damages the concept of public transport. no the real solution is get over this mythological idea that America is too ca…

It seems that way because the costs are centralized, but cars are as well, and it's disingenuous to compare this way. If you look at how many people go in debt to own cars or the amount of credit on cars, you would see poor numbers there as well. Cars are incredible money sinks. There is a reason why Uber doesn't operate its own fleet. If public transit billed by value it would easily be kept afloat. But the value pr…

The 520 bridge[1] cost approx. $4.5 billion

By way of contrast the Millau Viaduct[2] cost approx. €400 million and the Øresund Bridge[3] cost approx €2.6 billion — and represents an order of magnitude more engineering challenge.

Civil engineering in the US just seems to cost a lot more than in other developed countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bridg...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millau_Viaduct

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Øresund_Bridge

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#290

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

pkulak wrote: post #170
Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

No one thinks that you just hook up ML to a camera and you're done. Literally everyone working on this only uses ML for identification. When that Model X crashed into a highway divider, it was because the lines on the road were very faint and there was a fork in the line that actually wasn't the _real_ lane line. The car followed that by mistake, but only because of the misidentification of the lane line. How are mor…

> How are more sensors going to tell the difference between a plastic bag and a cat?

Infrared transparency? Radar cross section? There are so many ways. Sensor doesn't just mean "webcam".

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