Electric self-driving enables mass transit that evolves to the needs of the citizens without spewing diesel exhaust everywhere.
The self-driving car is a red herring
191–200 of 320 posts
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#192I 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…
Getting the rich to subsidize new tech is a great way to democratize it, though. The self driving car's endgame might not be a car after all.
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#193Earlier 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 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 trans…
Canada might have certain urban areas with public transport, but huge swaths of the country depend on cars. That is the same situation as the U.S. except we've got 10x the population as Canada...so we've got more people in more places. As for Australia, a huge chunk of the country is desert, and most people are situated along the coasts.
The U.S. doesn't want urbanism. People by and large do not want to live in dense urban areas. Some people like it, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. With the remote work revolution, it's going to become even less appealing to live in a dense urban area.
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
The rest of the world is rife with small, rural towns that nevertheless have great public transit systems, or at least ones that are more effective than what we see in the US. The major difference is that these places are willing to invest in the public sphere, and they're by and large willing to permit construction that is not car-centric (i.e., no parking minima to subsidize drivers).
Could you give a few examples of small rural towns where people can afford cars but instead the town has great public transit? Genuinely curious!
Iowa City, Iowa
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?
Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing? I'm really sick of this trope. I have been using Linux on the desktop almost exclusively for 15 years. Yes, I still have to fix weird issues on occasion . . . about as frequently as I have to fix weird issues on my wife's Windows machine.
That's funny, I used Linux on the desktop exclusively for about 10 years, which, by my math, ended about the time your experience started.
And I still find the "Linux on the Desktop" trope to be funny.
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#196I 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…
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…
Running a bus isn't that expensive. Running one every 15 minutes around a small town in a loop isn't that expensive.
I don't think there's anything fundamental about density. Its about ridership and funding. Even LA could have functional mass transit if it had the will to fund 15-minute busses on a grid all day. A 25 cent tax on gas would do it. If even 2 people average rode each bus, it'd break even on traffic density as well?
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#197The 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?
I'm not saying it's statistical, it's just a reference to a small issue which is compounded because of high fatality risk and that the dynamic environment makes the likelihood of unlikely events more likely to occur.
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#198I 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…
The city that I live in is very spread out. The idea of hopping from a subway to a bus to another bus just to get to a doctor's appointment sounds awful. And if I had to take 4 young kids along with me for the trip, double awful. For the denser cities - my wife and I lived in SF for close to five years. As our family grew, and the city space grew more populous, parking spots were really rare. Getting to a pediatric a…
Indeed, the creature comforts of a car is probably the big reason they are so successful compared to the alternatives. I rode public transportation well into my late twenties I think. When some folks would accompany me for the trip at times they didn't even own hardy thick winter coats to be able to bear the cold elements outside. People who haven't had to spend significant times standing and waiting to be picked up outside can be pretty shocked at how unpleasant the experience can be, especially given harsher locations.
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#199I 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…
I don't think anybody is suggesting that. But if public transport is better, if there are safe paved roads for cyclists, and if city center become safer for pedestrians, then maybe people will buy less cars and drive less miles...
Re: The self-driving car is a red herring
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ca…
This was illustrated in a chart[0] by someone on the Tesla subreddit just yesterday.
Using Autopilot is in general much safer even though it does from time to time make fatal mistakes that human would not do. (Like when it fails to recognise a truck and tries to drive through it[1].)
Of course AP is a very different thing to FSD, so this doesn't speak anything about current nor future FSD safety.
[0] Autopilot safety comparison https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/jim86m/i_graph...
[1] Accident https://electrek.co/2019/03/01/tesla-driver-crash-truck-trai...