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The self-driving car is a red herring

nautil.us

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Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#161

Post by kanox »

itsoktocry wrote: post #46
AdrianB1 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers, that will be enough. That is not a lot of nines.

> When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers How could you even calculate this? By running massive experiments and seeing if fewer people die over a given period of time driving versus self-driving? Do you really think we can run such an experiment?

Such experiments are already running and there are statistics available comparing the rate of accidents with human versus computer driving.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#162

Post by Nevermark »

dathinab wrote: post #138
yreg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be rather unfortunate. If a system generally performs significantly safer than humans, its use should be encouraged. Outlier incidents shouldn't matter.

The Problem is that it might not be significant safety outside of well suited situations. This systems expect the user to shim in fastly if something goes wrong, which just can't work reliable given how human brains work. Furthermore the situations which can make a self driving car crash are not the same which make a human driver crash. Such crashes can be pretty arbitrary. Random things like advertisement on a bus h…

The key metric for Tesla and other manufacturers is not necessarily duplicating human cars avoidance in any given situation. Some situations might be easier for humans, and vice versa.

The right metric is simply a much lower accident and fatality rates for self-driving cars.

This flexibility reduces the challenge for self-driving cars since they are far from understanding situations at the level people potentially can, but still results in a safety win.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#163

Post by Fricken »

specialist wrote: post #70
digital-cygnet wrote: post #23

I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the techno…

Agree with your positive response. Missing from this conjecture is a synthesis with car and bike sharing. There will also be massive land use, zoning changes when there's 90% fewer personal cars. Unused capacity (parking, roads) freed up and repurposed. The role for autonomous driving for moving people (vs turking cargo) will look very different when our cities look more like medieval villas and college campuses. I s…

Most American cities are desperate for massive land use and zoning changes now, but I don't think it could happen without the implementation of broad mandates at the national level, such as you see in Japan. Politically that just seems impossible these days. Maybe it will seem more possible in a few years.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#164

Post by agentdrtran »

paul_f wrote: post #143
sirsar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density. The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density . Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a f…

The car did not directly kill density, it enabled people to choose less density.

I love making the free choice between a car that costs hundreds each month vs unlimited public transit for $90

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#165

Post by kanox »

abainbridge wrote: post #112
Kaze404 wrote: post #81

I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people? I'm not in the US, and while the p…

Agreed, but self-driving cars would enable self driving buses and they could be great. One problem with buses is that paying the drivers is expensive. As a result buses need to be big to amortize the cost of the driver across lots of users. But big buses don't work well in low demand times of the day. The only option is to run them less frequently, which sucks for users. And big buses don't fit down small streets. An…

> Agreed, but self-driving cars would enable self driving buses and they could be great.

Self-driving cars would enable self-driving taxis which would be superior to both private vehicles and public transport.

Imagine if there was no need to park and you could summon a vehicle of the appropriate size at will.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#166

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

paul_f wrote: post #143
sirsar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density. The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density . Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a f…

The car did not directly kill density, it enabled people to choose less density.

A small number of people like Robert Moses wielded enormous power over how our civil infrastructure was built in the post war period. Moses was famously opposed to public transit, going so far as to deliberately build bridges with overhead clearance too low for buses on routes to one of his beach developments.

During this period the federal dept of transportation was offering to pay 90% of urban freeway projects. There are a few famous examples of people negotiating a different outcome, like the light rail vs mt hood highway in Portland, Oregon. But the bulk of local politicians simply took the free money and built massive freeway infrastructure without much consideration of the future.

So no, this was not some broadly democratic choice or invisible hand of the market. It was a small number of politically powerful people making unilateral decisions using vast government funds.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#167

Post by AnthonyMouse »

sirsar wrote: post #116
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density. That's why it works in NYC and doesn't work in Los Angeles. But that means it's not just a matter of building mass transit. First you have to build taller buildings. And even then there are going to be places where it's just not happening. It doesn't matter how you change the zoning, nobody is going to build skyscrapers in Pine Blu…

LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density. The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density . Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a f…

Somerville, MA is in the middle of the Boston metro area. It's saturated with three and four story buildings and the downtown is 10+ story buildings. It's tall buildings.

LA County is full of detached single family homes and undeveloped land.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#168

Post by [deleted] »

Kaze404 wrote: post #81

I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people? I'm not in the US, and while the p…

[deleted]

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#170

Post by owyn »

thescriptkiddie wrote: post #125
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental prerequisite for functional mass transit is a high population density. That's why it works in NYC and doesn't work in Los Angeles. But that means it's not just a matter of building mass transit. First you have to build taller buildings. And even then there are going to be places where it's just not happening. It doesn't matter how you change the zoning, nobody is going to build skyscrapers in Pine Blu…

You don't have to build skyscrapers to achieve high population density, you just have to build 3-6 story buildings close together. See Paris for an example. And you can have functional public transport at modest population density as long as the road network is a well connected grid and not a maze of cul-de-sacs. See Toronto for an example. I agree that most of the US has been designed explicitly around the car, but…

Yeah, there's a cool project [1] that maps out all the historic streetcar routes in SF. There used to be a LOT of them, they all got ripped out to make more room for cars. There were rail tracks on the bay bridge! Those got ripped out in 1956 apparently. Everything was converted to buses so yeah, there's still public transit but I definitely feel like something valuable was lost there. I'd also argue that much of the bay area was built for street cars (they existed after all!) and we could always put them back if there was a compelling cost/benefit to doing so.

[1] https://sfstreetcars.co

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