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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

#201

Post by chrisco255 »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #166
paul_f wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The…

People wanted to live in the suburbs. It was definitely promoted by government and business leaders, but it was also desired organically by people. It may not seem obvious now, but prior to the suburbs, a lot of people lived in ragged tenement buildings that were in bad shape. The suburbs were a boon to the economy, to standard of living, to incomes, etc. I found a great video from a filmmaker on this subject:

How The US Government Sold Us On The Suburbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmL6xIg-EJ0

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#202

Post by chrisco255 »

agentdrtran wrote: post #164
paul_f wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My time is money, and public transit costs a lot of time and frustration. And with a car, I have freedom to go anywhere.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#203

Post by Kalium »

josephcsible wrote: post #172
Kalium wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You're absolutely right!

Freight cannot be efficiently moved between the railyard and final destinations on public transit, on foot, or on bicycles. Self-driving vehicles can do this.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#204

Post by kanox »

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…

The boring company is a bet on improving tunneling machines for speed and cost. This might not be realized but there's no good argument that proves it to be impossible.

There are fields where physical limits were already reached, for example rocket engines specific impulse has barely improved since the 60s because of fundamental chemistry, but this is not the case for tunnels.

Provided enough funding it should be possible to dig faster, and cheaper per km.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#205

Post by perardi »

d_burfoot wrote: post #179
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 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…

Toronto: not actually that dense.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+density+tor...

Well…OK, the core of Toronto is pretty dense, but the megasprawl that is amalgamated Toronto is not that dense.

But good luck getting by in any non-major metro area in Canada without a car. Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver…maybe Ottawa…it's doable, but the second you get into the suburbs, or cottage country, it's Subaru time.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#206

Post by dragonwriter »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #196
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…

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 densi…

> 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?

Busses accelerate, decelerate, and turn differently than cars, so even if in terms of steady-state flow the two-riders = break-even argument is correct, it's not in city traffic.

Moreover, I'd like to see your work on operating and capital costs, especially accounting for road wear for which the usual approximate rule of thumb is that it varies with the fourth power of vehicle weight.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#207

Post by Tiktaalik »

ericmay wrote: post #22

Actual red herring here is developing new automobile technologies at all.

Yep.

The car has created more problems than it has solved, what with CO2 emissions, brake and tire dust, and the incredible amount of car crash and pedestrian deaths.

Electric and autonomous cars would be positive steps forward to solving these problems, but are fundamentally still doing the wrong thing better.

The technology to solve all of our transportation problems already exists, and often has existed since the 19th century. Autonomous rapid transit has existed since the 1980s.

Compact towns with walkable streets, safe cycling lanes and high quality public transportation are all more effective and more affordable approaches to how we primarily move about our world.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#208

Post by simplyinfinity »

barnacled wrote: post #18

I like Filip Piekniewski's take on this [0] - deep learning is appropriate for environments where the cost of mistakes is low (or the errors are reversible) and you're able to 'average them out'. Self-driving cars are absolutely not in that category. "If your errors are irreversible and you can't average them out, and your application is in open domain where there will never be a shortage of out of distribution sampl…

> For me it's obvious the real issue are the edge cases - of course a self-driving car does fine in 99%+ of cases, but those small % of outlier cases are the ones where people potentially die. I suspect an entirely different approach is required to supplement/supplant the deep learning one and fully autonomous vehicles are still quite some way off.

Why is that every time the safety of self driving cars is brought up, people appear to ignore that human drivers are not 100% perfect. There are on average of 104 deaths on the road each day in the US. if we can get that number to 50 people, that's a net positive.

Self driving cars don't need to be perfect, just better than us.

So the question shouldn't be "are SDC perfect yet?" but "are they better than us?"

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#209

Post by ericmay »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #207
ericmay wrote: post #22

Actual red herring here is developing new automobile technologies at all.

Yep. The car has created more problems than it has solved, what with CO2 emissions, brake and tire dust, and the incredible amount of car crash and pedestrian deaths. Electric and autonomous cars would be positive steps forward to solving these problems, but are fundamentally still doing the wrong thing better. The technology to solve all of our transportation problems already exists, and often has existed since the…

Thank you for summarizing it... I guess I should have as well in my original post versus just the snide remark. Emotion got the best of me.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#210

Post by throwitaway1235 »

josephcsible wrote: post #176
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.

No I wouldn't support that. It doesn't scale. Coal work numbers in the 10's of thousands, employment through driving in the 10's of millions.
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