141–150 of 288 posts
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Funfact: San Franscisco has a public transport system in the area where the driverless cars are operating.
It took how many years just to add one new line?
To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain. I live in a place where public transport already has l…
I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying.
Yeah, it would be great if we all had amazing public transit instead of self-driving cars. But self-driving cars are making big advances, and transit isn't. In ten or twenty years, self-driving cars might be everywhere, and transit will probably be roughly as bad as it is today. That's why people are excited about one and not the other.
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I agree, but self-driving cars (in the success case) are something new. More safety, less traffic, no more parking. I could see them make the way to Europe too (I'd love to have Waymos in my rural village, where cars are still common).
>>less traffic, no more parking. These two goals are incompatible. If the idea is that self driving cars don't need to park, they can just drive around in circles until needed(which is an absolutely insane idea for a whole number of reasons, but let's stick with it for a second), then that will only increase not decrease traffic. >>I could see them make the way to Europe too I've love to see a Waymo navigate some nar…
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Wild idea: maybe they could try to make a pilot project of that in - ironically - the decaying Motor City maybe. Also: the big car mania spilling over from the US to Europe makes driving in European cities/roads more and more difficult, as formerly bidirectional parts are now choke points where only a single oversized SUV can fit through at a time.
I suspect that if a metro would be built in a large car centric city over time the city would adapt to the metro and become less car centric. But making the economical argument for building the metro in the first place would be very hard. It would pay back over a time scale that capitalist economies hardly consider.
(I don't have a better alternative to democracy; just stating that's where the flaw is. Well, that and zero incentive to do things well/efficiently outside of political kudos).
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According to the article, Amsterdam was still built with bicycles in mind: > At the start of the 20th century, bikes far outnumbered cars in Dutch cities and the bicycle was considered a respectable mode of transport for men and women. But when the Dutch economy began to boom in the post-war era, more and more people were able to afford cars Amsterdam also has 50% higher population density than Los Angeles, despite h…
Well fair enough, but I really don't think Americans should throw their hands up in the air and say "we just can't do it." This is the country that landed a man on the moon after all, it should be a solvable problem. Maybe the Europeans can't help with their own experience, but the American solution of "just add another lane" is self-evidently unsustainable. Something new is needed.
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>>less traffic, no more parking. These two goals are incompatible. If the idea is that self driving cars don't need to park, they can just drive around in circles until needed(which is an absolutely insane idea for a whole number of reasons, but let's stick with it for a second), then that will only increase not decrease traffic. >>I could see them make the way to Europe too I've love to see a Waymo navigate some nar…
Less traffic and no parking is compatible because there are fewer total cars, as Waymos are shared.
To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain. I live in a place where public transport already has l…
Since, well, everything could be much better and it's still fairly unclear who makes substantial progress on one of these problems, I am fairly happy to let various playbooks play out and see where progress can be made.
To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people. The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain. I live in a place where public transport already has l…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the problem with Uber’s self-driving initiative was that they didn’t know what they were doing, except for the main guy who stole the IP from Google.
I think the Uber model they mean is the more general "sell your service at a loss today to increase market share, hoping it will become cheaper for you tomorrow".