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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

#241

Post by autokad »

cannabis_sam wrote: post #222
chrisco255 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transportation is synchronous by necessity. Private transportation is asynchronous. There are tremendous economic benefits to asynchronous transport. The truth is a robust system would have a healthy mix of both.

I absolutely agree, the synchronous/asynchronous description is both absolutely apt and correct. But the choice for the individual is muddled by the very concept of externalities. It’s cheaper to pollute our planet, than enduring the inconvenience of public transport. But the only reason that is true, is the terrible economic systems we all live under.

> "But the choice for the individual"

End it there and stop trying to make decisions for other people.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#242

Post by UncleOxidant »

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 was working at a large corporation a couple of years ago and looked out over the parking lot which covered many acres - there were roughly 3000 cars there. And this was just one of 4 campuses of said corporation in my area. In total they have well over 10,000 cars parked on those parking lots every day (prior to covid, anyway). At an average cost of $25,000 there were around $250M worth of cars parked on those lots. And they sit Idle there for 8 hours/day. Most cars are sitting idle 95% of the time. That's a lot of capital just sitting doing nothing most of the time not to mention all of the land required to store them.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#243

Post by [deleted] »

zamfi wrote: post #187
atharris wrote: post #107

Earlier 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!

[deleted]

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#244

Post by hutzlibu »

shadowgovt wrote: post #220
clairity wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

electric kick scooters (and bikes) make foot-travel distance less relevant in many places, extending the serviceable radius around a station from 1/3 mile to 2-3 miles. we just need to turn street parking into dedicated bike/scooter lanes to make it safe enough for more people to choose this option.

Possibly. Americans seem real reluctant to hop on a bike, and I don't think it's just for safety reasons. Big chunks of the US are too cold to want to be outside that much, a lot of the year. But more dedicated bike infrastructure would be a huge help in general.

"Big chunks of the US are too cold to want to be outside that much, a lot of the year."

There are surely limits to everything and not everyone is into extreme sports, but even in the winter I really like cycling. Much, much more, than the virus infested public transport.

There is a saying, there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#245

Post by bart_spoon »

Grimm1 wrote: post #153

I know people love public transport because of the supposed larger benefit to society but having ridden NYC public transport for over 7 years now I absolutely loath it. The experience is horrible almost every day. Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault I'm simply not willing to deal with that continuously. I put up with it because it…

I'm puzzled as to why its such a mess in the US, even in areas with "good" public transportation, compared to other nations. I lived in Japan for several years, and the subway/rail/bus systems are wonderful. Easy to use, reliable, clean, and no issues the mentally unwell or homeless bothering you.

Is it cultural? Or is it a matter of political/economic policy? I have no idea, but I'd kill to be able to bring it to the US.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#246

Post by SilasX »

bluedino wrote: post #218
Grimm1 wrote: post #153

I know people love public transport because of the supposed larger benefit to society but having ridden NYC public transport for over 7 years now I absolutely loath it. The experience is horrible almost every day. Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault I'm simply not willing to deal with that continuously. I put up with it because it…

>> Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault Three of the four of those are things you don't hear people complaining about with the transit system in Japan because of the culture differences in the USA. How can that be fixed, here?

Well, I can think of two possibilities:

1) Japan has scalably solved mental illness to the point that, in expectation, you will never be near someone still suffering therefrom.

2) Japanese law enforcement doesn't f--- around when it comes to train etiquette, and even so the most dangerous people don't mess with riders.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#247

Post by cfarre »

zamfi wrote: post #187
atharris wrote: post #107

Earlier 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!

Redmond, Oregon

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#248

Post by mhermher »

clows wrote: post #13
question000 wrote: post #9

Self-driving cars, computer speech recognition and the collapse of the federal reserve system. Things that are going to perpetually happen next year since the inception of Hacker News.

Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?

I mean, it clearly isn't. When is the last time you heard that in earnest and not as a joke?

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#249

Post by mhermher »

vorpalhex wrote: post #121
tim333 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's raised it to this year! >“It’s almost getting to a point where I can go from my house to work with no interventions, despite going through construction and widely varying situations,” he said. >“So this is why I’m very confident about full self-driving functionality being complete by the end of this year. It’s because I’m literally driving it.” Though reading that it sounds more like the car can drive from A to…

I think there's a conflict in what "self driving car" means. I think many users imagine being chauffered around while they read a tablet, potentially not even needing a drivers license. Meanwhile I think realists and Elon Musk expect a car that is doing most of the menial parts of driving while a licensed human driver is still hands on but not doing much work. We're close to that realist scenario in many ways for som…

In his intro speech of the Model 3, specifically talking about the FSD he was selling, he talked about something like "one day you could sleep while your car ...". I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something along those lines. Tying it very closely (albeit in some indefinite future) to the product he was selling. He's not a "realist" or "skeptic" in any way.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#250

Post by FabHK »

pedrocr wrote: post #82
ghaff wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>when you consider how high road mortality is Except, depending upon your perspective, it really isn't most places. In the US it's about one fatality per 100 million miles driven and that includes driving under difficult conditions like snowstorms. People drive a lot so that still adds up to a lot of deaths per year. But the rate is not really all that high.

That rate is on the order of 1000x worse than airliners which was the comparison as that's the level of reliability people are expecting from self-driving cars. A self-driving car that's 100x worse than the airliner standard would still save 90% of all road fatalities. And yet saving 30k lives might still not be enough for people to accept such a lower standard compared to an airliner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T…

This statistic is in terms of passenger miles, but airplanes travel much faster per car, and airplane journeys are normally much longer than a typical car ride.

So, planes might be around 500x better per pax-mile, but per pax-journey they're just about 5x better.

Incidentally, the fatality rate for self driving cars should be also around 5x better (per vehicle mile) than human drivers for wide spread acceptance, according to an 2018 study.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180530132959.h...

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