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Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
It wasn't your money.
Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
According to the UN, it's enough to save over 40million lives (for almost two years) We have our priorities all twisted.
Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
That's $1Bn for the hundred largest cities in the world.
Assuming even 40% of that went to the US, that's $1Bn for the top 40 cities. That leaves out 22 entire states [0], and like 75% of the population...
Look to NYC, LA, and SF for what $1Bn gets you... It's about 1 mile of subway [1]. And it takes close to 15 years to build.
We wouldn't all be riding around on space elevators with materially better lives if this money was invested in subways or trains.
If you spent $40Bn on busses - you'd have to spend another $250Bn to pay people to ride them...
Self-driving cars will eventually change cities. I think there's evidence it's already starting to happen.
I don't think this money would've been better spent on trains, and definitely not busses.
What else are you thinking of?
I'd be interested in a better cost breakdown of bike lanes and how much it would cost to get a significant percentage of people in cities biking & scootering around - but I'm skeptical, and also, it's not mass transit!
NYC installed 29.5 miles of protected bike lanes last year [2]. I can't find the cost, but next year they're asking for $3.1Bn to build 500 miles of protected bike lanes, among many other things [3]. I know it costs less than $1M to pave a two-lane road one mile [4] - so a protected bike lane should be well under $1M - but then everything costs way more in the city...
If protected bike lanes cost substantially less than $5M per mile in the city (like $0.5M) - $40Bn could get you pretty far!
That's 80k miles of protected bike lanes! That's about 4x the amount of total bike lanes we have now.
Bike commute rates in NYC are decent (by US standards). I'd love to see a study on how much bike commute rates increased after these new lanes were completed.
Copenhagen has only 240 miles of bike lanes and 600 miles of paths for 70 square miles and 750k people [4]. That's enough to get 62% of people commuting by bike [5]!
For the top 40 cities, you'd be looking at like 80k miles of protected bike lanes for 4000 square miles and 81M people. That's better than Copenhagen!
That could potentially get you close to 62% of people biking instead of driving - just depends on if that many people live within 5 miles of work / school / going out. 5 miles being the average commute distance in Copenhagen [6].
62% of cars off the road in the top 40 US cities would DEFINITELY change my life for the better - but I'd be surprised if we could even get 15%. Still, it's something you could do in a couple of years - and for $40Bn - would definitely be worth it. But it's decidedly not mass transit.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/vividmaps.com/map-of-largest-me...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyre...
[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/cyclingintheci...
[3] https://www.6sqft.com/council-wants-additional-3-1b-to-build...
[4] https://homeguide.com/costs/asphalt-driveway-cost#:~:text=Co....
[5] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-07/copenh...
[6] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-07/copenh....)
$100B is not that much when you compare it to the value self-driving cars will create. There are over 1 billion cars on the road which need humans to drive them. How much are they used? I don't know. Let's say one ride per day. When cars turn into a service business, the "driver" will be software. What will be paid to the driver? Let's say $1 per ride. That is 1B * $1 * 365 = $365B per year. Give that a p/e ratio of…
> will create. just think of the huge economic value that faster-than-light travel will unlock!! you're assuming your conclusion
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.
>Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time. That sounds sustainable and scalable to earth-size, for sure.
Have you noticed that lately there has been a symphony of media news to bash everything related to green energy, including EVs, self driving cars, batteries and so on? It feels like we are getting brainstormed to induce us to remove investments in this sector so that others can get in at a much lower entry point. Is it just in my head?
What does self-driving have to do with any of the other things though? Whether there's a human behind the wheel of an EV or an algorithm doesn't make any difference for climate change. If anything, the money wasted on self-driving could have gone into more pragmatic goals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Object detection is an issue, but it doesn't only apply to "moving" objects. The current state of the art is having trouble differentiating between a "solid" stationary object like a tire or chunk of metal that must be navigated around, and something like an empty plastic bag that can be safely ignored. Regarding infrastructure, AVs also seem to have a lot of trouble with faded lane lines on roads.
If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.
This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
There’s also no such thing as a Level 4 Autonomous vehicle. It doesn’t exist.
Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.
Instead of wasting research money on computer networking, you could spend it on stamps and envelopes.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But you don't know what's going to come out of that research before hand.
This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…
This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't seem to go away. The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do. (However yo…
And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.
We already have self driving cars. We call it public transport.
Doesn't allow point to point. I lose about 5 hours a week due to cycling and using public transport.