761–770 of 811 posts
I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great. I think it would be meaningful to also…
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> rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person. Do you have evidence of this? It's certainly true for some kinds of professional drivers (i.e. truck and bus drivers) but I can't find any kind of crashes/100m mile numbers for rideshare drivers. Anecdotally as both a rider and road user I find rideshare drivers to be some of the worst. Aggressive, distracted, impatient, and overconf…
The cars are generally in good repair. They are typically taking decent enough roads. They are sober (or more sober than the average driver). They are driving "normal" routes -- from a house to a business, or a club to an apartment, often on routes they've run many times. I don't know where you've been getting your aggressive, distracted, impatient, overconfident drivers. Most of my ride sharing has been airport to/f…
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Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.
Roads designed for buses (and trucks) also cost many orders of magnitude more than ones build for cars only. If you account for that, cost per passenger mile on fully loaded electric bus is more than uber chauffeur.
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Who pays when a natural occurring rock slide totals your car? There are already situations where no one can be held liable.
Yes, but those situations are irrelevant to this issue. The question is, who pays when your self-driving car injures or kills somebody? I assure you that the answer to that question is not “nobody.”
Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in. Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive beca…
Aren't the route restrictions that this data was collected on a large confounder? They are specifically placed to avoid difficult or dangerous areas. For example in the bay area only recently were they allowed to go on the freeway, and only in certain areas.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2023/f...
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The point is that good public transport makes cars unnecessary for the vast majority of everyday life in an urban setting. And, in particular, it means that taking away someone's license, even for a long period of time, doesn't have to be as crippling as it is in cities that don't have good infrastructure - hopefully leading to society being way more willing to apply drastic driving penalties to repeat offenders.
Unnecessary is a very strong word. It's also unnecessary to have your own private house, sharing it with other people would be more efficient.
For lots of people in cities or large portions of Europe, going without a car is much better.
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> "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving." A lot of these are true about other things like pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, and mass rail transit. The kool-aid is that the robotaxi people act like they are the first one to solve this problem.
No, dammit. Pedestrian friendly streets are great! You can't walk that far, and I love walking places when I have time and energy. Bike lanes are great! I bike to work. If I'm not careful I'll arrive sweaty, and that inherently limits when and where I bike. Mass rail transit is great! It cannot get directly to every door or frequently even to within walking distance of every door (I take a train to the office when I…
We've seen what can be done with the magical technologies of today, like misinformation abd mass surveillance. I think it's naive to assume self driving technology won't be used badly, specially when car infrastructure is already a "political" topic, having impact in city planning, budgets and stuff.
I remember this video by CGP Grey where the guy says like when all cars are self-driving cars everything will be perfect.
https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?si=JJM5pXtIfmpsm781
I remember, in 2016, liking the video, then time passed, went to Europe, and saw the actual solution to the problem. And now, in 2026, I see a bunch of comments in the video in the same vein.
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Yeah, most places other than the US do. Good public transit is a far, far better solution than better cars. Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking min…
Cars are one of the most wasted expense all over the world. People buy cars suited for what they want 1% of the time. With electric mobility options available today I think public transport makes more and more sense. Asia and Europe with the dense cities should start optimising their roads for 1 passenger electric transport.
I have said for a while now that self driving cars do not need to be perfect. They will have accidents, of a different type than humans have, and sometimes they will be ones that most humans would avoid. What they do need to be is better than humans overall, and then it would make sense for them to be allowed onto the road. When they get far safer than humans, phasing out of human driving will make sense. They reache…
Wherever you draw it, there is a group of 10-100 million drivers who will be less safe (to themselves and others) in an automated vehicle.
There’s reason to believe that automated vehicles exceed bad drivers, and may improve , but it’s no guarantee that they will exceed very good or excellent drivers.
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> The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system. Looking at population density if you draw a 50km radius in the Netherlands you get about 8m people. This covers lots of…
> Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, emerging from outward rural growth rather than seeing an active urbanization movement. Trains have be…
The vast majority of housing has been built since laying most railtrack and in many places around (new) train stations.