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Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

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Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#61

Post by nradov »

simne wrote: post #53
DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explain how trains solve the last mile problem? The thing that roads already solve?

It is possible, and it could be extremely effective, but not straight way. 1. exists concept of linear city, and exists few implementations, most known: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volgograd 2. In linear city, possible to create just one line of train, and station every mile, and all other transport muscular, or something like pneumatic-mail and open conveyors. In some cases, could be effective to make rectangular…

The concept of a linear city only works if you completely ignore real world geography like hills, rivers, etc.

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#62

Post by jefftk »

opportune wrote: post #48
mrshadowgoose wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build trains...on every single road in existence? Neither my house or workplace is adequately serviced by public transport, and even if they both were, I wouldn't use it unless legally or financially forced to. I enjoy proceeding directly from point A to B in the comfort of a private space, and so do very many other people. The waste of personally-owned automobiles is admittedly abhorrent. Electrification and self-dr…

You could probably put a streetcar on every other street in many dense locales. In fact historically that’s how they were set up The problem is after the 50’s, in much of the country, development consists of large residential-only suburban developments feeding into highways. So streetcars won’t work for that

Street cars are not much easier to automate than driverless cars, though. It's only fully separated trains that we automate currently.

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#63

Post by grandmczeb »

maccam94 wrote: post #44
syntheweave wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate seeing this premise. It is railfan navelgazing. I like rails and ride them frequently. Rails are not the future for passenger commuting, outside of the middle-long distances that heavy rails serve. What AV addresses is primarily a last-mile problem. Last mile is all about the personal transport solution, and cars are just the largest of those. The physics and geometry of cars means that they are more expensive…

The last mile is only a problem because people live in single-family housing zones, where there is not enough density for mass transit. We created this type of land use for several mostly not good reasons. Trains are far more efficient than car infrastructure. Why do commuters need a self driving car if there are trains that run by your block every 5 minutes, and get you to your office block in 10-20?

Why stop there? Trains are only necessary because the density isn’t high enough to walk everywhere. We wouldn’t need them if everyone just lived in the cube[1].

[1] https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-buildi...

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#64

Post by dangus »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #43
salmonfamine wrote: post #8

Self-driving cars are a solution for a problem that has already been solved. Build trains. But of course, this doesn't benefit automakers, requires a move towards high-density housing that NIMBY's and certain classes of investors oppose, so instead we'll create an entirely new class of problems by allowing these companies to unleash their insufficient technology on public roads.

Build trains...on every single road in existence? Neither my house or workplace is adequately serviced by public transport, and even if they both were, I wouldn't use it unless legally or financially forced to. I enjoy proceeding directly from point A to B in the comfort of a private space, and so do very many other people. The waste of personally-owned automobiles is admittedly abhorrent. Electrification and self-dr…

This video might be relevant to your described scenario:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDXB0CY2tSQ

Notice how in The Netherlands, despite making bikes, transit, and pedestrians welcome in this suburban business park near the airport, you can still drive there if you want.

Yes, if you lived in The Netherlands, you could drive to this business park shown in the video in your personal vehicle. There's a parking garage right there, and even though the infrastructure is pedestrian and bicycle focused and prioritized, the cars don't have to wait long at the traffic signal or endure crazy traffic.

Why is that? Because there are fewer cars.

Why are there fewer cars? Because there are viable alternatives.

Essentially, having better public transit, pedestrian, and cycling infrastructure actually makes life better for drivers, too!

The thing is, in North America, in most places you don't actually have any sort of choice on whether you want to drive or not. If you don't drive, your entire environment is hostile to your very existence, and public transit is just for the poor and desperate. You must buy a car whether you want to or not. That's not really choice or freedom.

You're saying that you would choose a personal vehicle, but does that choice have the potential to change if the surrounding circumstances change?

So, it's perfectly fine that you'd prefer to own an automobile. You're free to pay the close to $10,000 a year it costs for the average person to own a new car according to AAA.

I personally wouldn't make that choice if I had a better one available, but if I live in suburban America the choice has been made for me.

> Electrification and self-driving systems (and the resulting fleets of cheap automated taxis) will go a long way towards reducing the waste inherent to automobiles.

This is what's so frustrating about talking about the future of the transportation with people who can't imagine a world that lessens the emphasis on car-scale infrastructure. The waste problem with automobiles has already been solved. It has been solved by not using them as much.

This isn't a hypothetical. We have living, working examples of how to use cars less often in small towns, medium sized suburbs, and big cities.

Making cars self-driving is putting lipstick on a pig. It's like taking high blood pressure drugs instead of losing weight.

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#65

Post by mmazing »

tmcw wrote: post #38
mmazing wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't efficient self driving cars also be public transportation? What if we had a publicly funded self driving car network? No more drunk drivers mowing down children, no more gigantic parking lots everywhere (like uber, you wouldn't likely get in the same car that took you there). It would also almost certainly reduce traffic fatalities to near zero. In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT sp…

Sure, so the most direct answer is that a belief in self-driving cars that are safe and reliable and accessible isn’t grounded in any current evidence. We’ve spent a few billion on development and spun up dozens of companies and so far accomplished - relative to expectations - almost nothing. No self-driving trip across the country, like Musk thought we’d do years ago. The self-driving fleet in SF keeps breaking down…

I totally agree with everything you're saying, there's definitely a long way to go. I am certainly not advocating for going all-in on them any time soon.

I don't see any harm in trying though, or continuing to try and improve them. If we had said that a boom-box sized car phone wasn't useful enough, so why bother trying, where would phones be now?

Besides, you can probably point to any number of people in history that said that humans would never fly, that computers were unwieldy room-sized devices that consumers would never use, that the internet would never be anything more than communication between universities.

It's also just fun to think about the possibilities! :)

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#66

Post by yurishimo »

jefftk wrote: post #62
opportune wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could probably put a streetcar on every other street in many dense locales. In fact historically that’s how they were set up The problem is after the 50’s, in much of the country, development consists of large residential-only suburban developments feeding into highways. So streetcars won’t work for that

Street cars are not much easier to automate than driverless cars, though. It's only fully separated trains that we automate currently.

Yea but you can move 100 people with 1 person driving the tram. Basically automated. They are glorified babysitters. Forward and stop. End of the line, they walk to the opposite end of the tram and do it again.

You don’t need full automation with the efficiency that trains provide when moving lots of people.

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#67

Post by onionisafruit »

whimsicalism wrote: post #60
onionisafruit wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what real problem self driving cars are supposed to solve aside from some people aren’t able to drive. Some might say that self driving cars would be safer than human driven cars, but that fails to account for the fact that any safety improvements from self driving cars can be built into active safety features in regular cars.

> I’m not sure what real problem self driving cars are supposed to solve aside from some people aren’t able to drive there could presumably be large improvements in the ratio of cars to people.

The ratio would be improved by more people sharing cars. It seems like that can be done regardless of whether that car is self driving. If Car2Go hadn’t been driven out of business by VC money subsidizing Uber rides, it would be improving that ratio for us today.

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#68

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

mrshadowgoose wrote: post #43
salmonfamine wrote: post #8

Self-driving cars are a solution for a problem that has already been solved. Build trains. But of course, this doesn't benefit automakers, requires a move towards high-density housing that NIMBY's and certain classes of investors oppose, so instead we'll create an entirely new class of problems by allowing these companies to unleash their insufficient technology on public roads.

Build trains...on every single road in existence? Neither my house or workplace is adequately serviced by public transport, and even if they both were, I wouldn't use it unless legally or financially forced to. I enjoy proceeding directly from point A to B in the comfort of a private space, and so do very many other people. The waste of personally-owned automobiles is admittedly abhorrent. Electrification and self-dr…

>Electrification and self-driving systems (and the resulting fleets of cheap automated taxis) will go a long way towards reducing the waste inherent to automobiles.

Why would electric vehicles reduce waste? Cleaner, sure. But we’d be just as capitalist. City people didn’t ditch their cars and buy their pristine 4WD Ford Trucks that they use to transport their kids because this was the cheaper and saner option.

Electric vehicles will just mean these people will ditch their current vehicles and buy a new Cyber Truck every few years.

Lock downs during the pandemic showed us what needs to be done: Get rid of as many vehicles as possible. Remember all the wildlife that came back and the cleaner air?

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#69

Post by drbawb »

mmazing wrote: post #31
tmcw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, so I’m from a tiny town in New Jersey. I was used to having to drive 30 minutes to the train station as a kid, and there are no buses there, so car ownership is mandatory. Took a long time to realize that next to one of the buildings in town was a train station. And twenty years ago there were buses, too. Anyway, solve the last mile by funding transit and rebuilding trains. We had them before, we should have th…

Why can't efficient self driving cars also be public transportation? What if we had a publicly funded self driving car network? No more drunk drivers mowing down children, no more gigantic parking lots everywhere (like uber, you wouldn't likely get in the same car that took you there). It would also almost certainly reduce traffic fatalities to near zero. In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT sp…

>Why can't efficient self driving cars also be public transportation?

Cars are inefficient. It has nothing to do with the operators, ride-sharing, time-sharing, clever routing, the powertrain, energy storage, emissions, etc. The form-factor itself is horrendously inefficient for moving people. In terms of traffic density cars are virtually the worst mode of transportation we have.[1]

It's not an argument against automation, it's an argument against cars. (Particularly in America: where people seem to want the largest, heaviest vehicles they're allowed to operate w/ a typical license. On a daily basis I see multiple vans or trucks, most weighing in excess of 4,000 lbs now, transporting a lone individual.)

>In my opinion the main benefit is the most overlooked - NOT spending X hours of your own mental bandwidth and focus worrying about crashing a deadly vehicle.

You can get that, right now, without investing another cent in self-driving cars. There is plenty of time (and space!) to curl up with a good book on a train, for instance.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06IjfbqdnNM

Re: Cruise’s Robot Car Outages Are Jamming Up San Francisco

#70

Post by tmcw »

mmazing wrote: post #65
tmcw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, so the most direct answer is that a belief in self-driving cars that are safe and reliable and accessible isn’t grounded in any current evidence. We’ve spent a few billion on development and spun up dozens of companies and so far accomplished - relative to expectations - almost nothing. No self-driving trip across the country, like Musk thought we’d do years ago. The self-driving fleet in SF keeps breaking down…

I totally agree with everything you're saying, there's definitely a long way to go. I am certainly not advocating for going all-in on them any time soon. I don't see any harm in trying though, or continuing to try and improve them. If we had said that a boom-box sized car phone wasn't useful enough, so why bother trying, where would phones be now? Besides, you can probably point to any number of people in history tha…

I’m totally fine with folks trying - plenty of companies want to build self-driving cars and investors want to buy into those companies, and all that can just sort itself out and win or lose.

The problem is when folks - and I’m not saying just like this thread, but this is a phenomenon in some governance - when folks say that self-driving cars mean that we should reduce public transit or rail investment now, because those problems will be solved, right around the corner, as soon as the cars work.

If/when self-driving cars happen, sure, that’ll be great! People who are skeptical about the technology aren’t going to stop Tesla or Waymo from forging ahead. But car-centric planning does, currently, reduce public transit investment, and self-driving car hype does reduce the political will to build rail.

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