841–850 of 852 posts
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Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?
Didn't they just launch autonomous Ubers in London last week?
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…
Which people? The bottom 20th percentile? 50th? Where do you draw the line? 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.
These things are set so that, on average, everyone is safer. If allowing self driving cars raises the safety of everyone on average, it makes sense.
Personally, I would be in favour of everyone having to either use a self driving car or gain an advanced driving certificate so they could drive manually. One that only 10-20% of people could pass, this would include an in depth theoretical section as well as a 2-3 hour driving test.
My hypothesis of why autocars will make life so much better than we're imagining, which I think a lot of negative/hater folks miss includes: (All of this is very USA centric because that's my context) - Very old people who lose their license will get mobility back, as will blind or otherwise unlicenseable people - Autocars can break phantom traffic jams - They should massively reduce DUIs - They will serve as a form…
Arguments I heard that make no sense to me: - Autonomous cars will improve traffic because stopped cars can start going at the same time at an intersection -> Then you have no safety distance. And while theoretical improved reaction times mean you might need a bit less distance, the quadratic term comes from the needed breaking deceleration, not the reaction time. - Autonomous cars will reduce congestion: they can't…
Just think a little about what having a computer control the car would really mean, rather than thinking of them like robot people.
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That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.
It works even better with high demand because it's easier to find multiple people traveling to/from the same places.
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Then why is Amtrak breaking ridership records?
Losing $1.8B/year ($55/ride) isn't anything to be proud of.
Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percenta…
That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.
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My pithy response is the same as people who have told me what to do when I try and advocate for transit. “Move somewhere else.” I don’t find these problems unsolvable. We spend over $200 billion on roads a year. That’s almost $75bn more than the CA high speed rail. That’s project has its own problems but local buses and street cars and road diets would cost minuscule fractions of that number and improve conditions an…
Good public transit is more than just the infrastructure. It's also the law and order, which is not an easy political problem to fix.
I take various forms of transit regularly and I’ve never had an issue more noteworthy than any interaction I’ve had in a car.
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Yeah thats a useful factor for all those "visiting mom in Portland" trips from Washington DC that a train is obviously meant to replace, not any of those "100 mi or less visits to mom" that de facto MUST be taken in a car regardless of the population density of the surrounding 100mi radius. Also we should ignore the fact that the US already had a national rail network and STILL DOES for freight and had frequent regio…
Where I live now to where my mom lives would take 24 to 30 hours by train and cost 400 to 500 usd. At 30mpg and $5/gal, the cost of driving is $200 and takes 12h. So I can take a train for double the time and cost or I can drive. Now consider round trip and passenger. It's 40 miles either side to get to a train. Neither side has a walkable city so being without a car sucks. Summer in one is hot as hell, winter in the…
And nothing says the train must take 30 hours. 12H of highway driving is what, 600 miles? 1000? The slowest high speed rail lines in China have a design speed of 120mph. Some go 240mph. So that 600 mile trip could take 5 hours. The 1000 mile trip could take 8 and some change. Add in an hour or so to account for stops.
Like, I struggle to imagine how every goddamn conversation I have about rail in the US ends up like this, with someone mistaking my "heres what COULD be" with a comparison to "here's what IS". Do you not think that someone advocating for trains doesn't understand how crappy they are right now? That I'm advocating you take the train despite all of the reasons you mentioned its awful? Do you think the fact that tickets can command that price despite taking 30 hours indicates a latent demand?
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Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
Because most people feel uncomfortable being in the tiny vehicle that sits below the bumber of all the trucks and suvs that surround them. It's one of those things that doesn't work until a large percentage of other people are doing it. Very few want to put themselves in more danger for principled reasons.