The self-driving car is a red herring • Hacker News Board

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#171

Post by toast0 » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

ggoo wrote: post #129

abainbridge wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Couldn't we already have self driving buses if we just put them on tracks? They go a predefined route anyway :)

Roads are cheaper than rails, and easier to change.

Buseses on wheels are more flexible than trams or whatever on tracks, and can route around a collision.

Rails in the road are a severe hazard for cyclists and somewhat hazardous for pedestrians.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#172

Post by josephcsible » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

Kalium wrote: post #126

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…

> 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? Public transit can't haul freight cross-country. Self-driving vehicles can. As others have pointed out, self-driving vehicles could significantly cut the operating costs of public transit. This also seems like a major win for investing in public transi…

> Public transit can't haul freight cross-country. Self-driving vehicles can.

Freight should be hauled cross-country on rails, not on roads.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#173

Post by HotAirBalloons » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

twox2 wrote: post #92

kindatrue wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also what's known as the "geometry" problem - 1 self driving car takes up as much space as 1 human driven car. Part of the problem is the general incompetency and mismanagement of US public transit construction -- the costs are insane, even when compared to "socialist" "high-cost" union-heavy Europe. This was a great read on why we get so little for our money: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-y…

Presumably if all cars were self driving, or say 90% were. Then that would become the next "public transportation". And if they were all electric, the footprint would be less harsh as well.

It's not public transportation in the same way that taxis aren't solving the public transportation problem. But also, why is it that there is this assumption that when self driving cars become a reality, they'll also be electric? The two problems are completely orthogonal, and while solving both of them are important, making self driving cars electric isn't a priority for most companies today.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#174

Post by josephcsible » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

raiyu wrote: post #148

The problem with self-driving cars is the 1% failure of software. Cars travel at a high rate of speed and a 1% error can easily be fatal. Either by hitting a pedestrian or someone on a bike, or by the car failing to acknowledge something and crashing itself head on into something. Because cars travel in a highly dynamic environment this 1% error and the fatality risk associated with it is very high, so you need to ha…

Did you just pull 1% out of the air?

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#175

Post by njarboe » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:49 PM UTC

barnacled wrote: post #27

ianai wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.

I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc. Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultim…

Rocket launch technology was at a standstill for 30-40 years until Elon Musk founded SpaceX. 15 years later they built reusable rockets. The cost of putting something into orbit is likely to drop by a factor of 100-1000 when SpaceX's next rocket is up and running sometime in the next few years.

It seems like such a waste of time for people to try and debunk these claims from people who are very competent and have access to the best in people and technology. Do they want a world where people don't try new things and make great improvements? One should really encourage people with a track record of getting people together to do amazing things to continue to do so. Elon Musk has stated that he thought that SpaceX had a 10% chance of success. I'm glad he could look at that chance of failure and tried anyway.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#176

Post by josephcsible » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:50 PM UTC

throwitaway1235 wrote: post #158

Autonomous transportation should be banned. The cost of putting 10 million + people out work do not match the benefits.

I assume you're also in favor of banning green energy because it puts coal miners out of work.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#177

Post by hardtke » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

neaanopri wrote: post #95

therockspush wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best way to reduce those outlier cases in this phase is to just focus on self driving on the freeway. That's where it has the most value for me, taking over for the long boring hauls. On the freeway you minimize a lot of those wildcards like bikes and pedestrians, everyone is going about the same speed, and there are only a few places you can enter and exit. We don't need to jump all the way to self drivi…

I totally agree with you. So why hasn't this happened yet? I believe this is because what we have here is not a technical problem, but primarily a regulatory and legal problem. If the political leadership of the NHTSA had the will to make highway self-driving happen, they could publish a draft safety and liability standard. The technical problem here is that while shuttle and robotaxi systems can go slow enough as to…

My proposal is that we treat liability in the self driving car space similar to the way we have a specialized liability framework for vaccines [1]. Similar to vaccines, self driving cars would lead to reduced deaths on aggregate, but there are cases where the technology fails and people are injured/killed. In the case of vaccines, consumers cannot sue the manufacturers using regular courts but instead there is a separate system where the standard for liability is much higher.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/driverless-car-stopped-lawyer...

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#178

Post by cannabis_sam » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

kanox wrote: post #146

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…

I really wish people would stop claiming that the solution to cars is walking or public transport. I don't have a car either but claiming that people should "stop driving" is not a serious approach. Cars are extremely useful and are not going anywhere. They have problems like carbon emissions and being extremely dangerous but those will have to be solved while preserving the fundamental utility of a cars: They are in…

>Cars are extremely useful

I agree, but I also think this is part of the problem.

Choosing to use public transportation for longer distances is a significant personal cost, while the benefit of lower costs in externalities is almost invisible.

Conversely, driving a car has a comparatively lower personal cost, essentially negative, since it increase freedom of movement. But the externalities are conveniently hidden by our economic and political systems.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#179

Post by d_burfoot » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

> The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density.

People have very naive explanations of why the US is so bad at density and urbanism. Canada and Australia, which are very similar to the US, have very dense cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Melbourne. Do they not have cars in Canada and Australia? If you want to find the real reason why all other developed countries have dense cities with good public transport, but the US doesn't, you need to look at what's different between the US and all other developed countries.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#180

Post by Texasian » Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 4:58 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #167

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…

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.

Downtown? What downtown? We don’t have one.

If your talking about Assembly Row, that’s a “town center” development. Used to be a movie theater and a sea of parking lots. It doesn’t factor into Somerville’s style of urbanism.