301–310 of 320 posts
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Why tunnels instead of the Japanese/German solution of ramps/viaducts? In the same vein, why underground instead of light rail? See, open air systems like those are much easier to service. Removing a crashed car from that requires just a big crane.
Because tunnels can go under buildings, roads and other tunnels with very little interference.
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 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,…
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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.
But I live in Cambridge, MA and I can assure you Somerville would remain one of the densest cities in the union if every last building therein was lopped down to 3 stories by a giant lawnmower.
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…
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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…
Its quite funny to me that literally everybody that is against Boring company is sighting these 'Thunderf00t' videos, and judging from some of his other videos he has a pretty clear bias. He is also a chemist and why his knowledge of engineering is better then those of the engineers at SpaceX and Elon Musk is highly questionable to me. > the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel The cars have front radar a…
!? I'm not a tunnel building specialist, but a cursory search seems to indicate that tunnel boring machines commonly already are electrically powered by simply using a very long high voltage cable stretching all the way from the tunnel entrance. Whether that cable then connects to the electricity grid, or to a bunch of temporary diesel generators stationed outside of the tunnel is a different matter, which in any case doesn't bear on the tunnel boring itself.
Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.
> Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well. People also posted this about 3D TVs and Cuecats.
Self driving vehicles will save $250+B/year in labor costs in the US alone - this is more impactful than the cotton gin and rivals the impact of refrigeration. 3D TVs and cuecat are 3-6 orders of magnitude smaller impact
Finally, it's worth mentioning that cuecat became QR codes which took off after getting built into cellphone cameras. 3D television didn't take off but 4K did i.e. consumer demand existed for richer TV images just not specifically 3D. Projectors remain niche as well even though they promise to take TV from 80" to 130+" - if ultra short throw (UST) projectors come down in price, I could see them going mainstream, especially in tandem with 4K/8K.
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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…
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From the internet: Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city. In Toronto, there are 4,457 people per square kilometre. In fact, Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541). And cruc…
> Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city. The transit systems in both cities operate across the entire metro area not just the "city" proper. Vancouver Metro Area: 2,463,431 / 2,878km² = 856 persons per km² San Francisco Metro Area: 4,729…
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Why tunnels instead of the Japanese/German solution of ramps/viaducts? In the same vein, why underground instead of light rail? See, open air systems like those are much easier to service. Removing a crashed car from that requires just a big crane.
Underground doesn’t get affected by weather. I wonder whether simply having more tunnels side by side would help for servicing issues. Small, numerous tunnels instead of large tunnels.
Cost also vastly increases, likelihood of total failure as well. Big tunnels need big supports and big service ducts.