151–160 of 415 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you make sure there isn’t human semen or worse on the seats on which you and your children will sit? At least with taxis driven by humans you knew that there was someone making sure that won’t happen that often, but with driverless taxis all bets are off.
Waymos have been far cleaner than the Ubers I've ridden in. I think they are cleaned daily?
Turns out infinite money, lawyers, lobbyists and engineering time gets you pretty far
I just left a version of this in another thread—I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems. Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall... Waymos avoid many…
I live in SF, and I take it daily. It's cheaper than paying for the parking garage near the office. And it's cheaper than Uber: the base rate is similar to Uber's, but there is no need to add a tip. Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few time…
Oh, I disagree, this is something I observe and in fact do myself quite a lot. We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven (i.e., frustration at the driver in front, wanting to take the more scenic route, being undecided about stopping at that cafe halfway).
I'm all for self driving in highly populated areas. In a perfect world I'd like to see it integrated into all vehicles, and when entering specific areas you are told your car will enter self-driving mode. Arguably this makes the most business sense for Waymo, licence the underlying tech to manufacturers that already have capacity to produce vehicles vs compete.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Autonomous vehicles could chain up or drive really close together and achieve similar space efficiency. Also, if you look at a train track. It's mostly empty space with a train passing occasionally. Very different than a well used road. And autonomous vehicles could collaborate to counter any congestion. What makes trains efficient has more to do with the cost of energy and drivers than anything else. Both of those g…
That "train passing occasionally" holds the equivalent of hundreds of cars. A random crappy light rail line will do the equivalent of 5 lanes of traffic (each direction). A serious subway more like 20. https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/transportation/solu... Even if you run cars with no distance between the bumpers you'll still need room for changing lanes, crossing and the line.
You also have to take into account all the other factors that make roads preferable, for example, that rail capacity number assumes perfect utilization. In practice railways often have lots of downtime due to overnight shutdowns, broken signals/trains and labor strikes. None of these affect the roads.
As a proponent of good public transportation I'm a bit afraid that automated taxis will get big enough in USA that they will start influence city wide decisions on how to develop city transport network even in Europe when time comes for them to expand their business.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have kids and don't like Taxis, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with your take. The idea of a humanless Taxi showing up to my house sounds way more appealing to me. I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver. I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft. I don't have to…
How do you make sure there isn’t human semen or worse on the seats on which you and your children will sit? At least with taxis driven by humans you knew that there was someone making sure that won’t happen that often, but with driverless taxis all bets are off.
Side question: when Tesla finally gets FSD working, will I be able to use my Tesla to make money by using it as a taxi? Or will there be licensing issues? In other words, will I own it or not?
As a proponent of good public transportation I'm a bit afraid that automated taxis will get big enough in USA that they will start influence city wide decisions on how to develop city transport network even in Europe when time comes for them to expand their business.
I'm sorry but good public transit in the US isn't going to happen. Passenger rail has never been profitable anywhere since its very inception. With the rise of remote work, and declining ratios of working-age populations putting increasing pressure on public finances, we're just never going to see a widespread expansion of public transit. AVs give us a path toward a world where very few people need to own their own c…
As a proponent of good public transportation I'm a bit afraid that automated taxis will get big enough in USA that they will start influence city wide decisions on how to develop city transport network even in Europe when time comes for them to expand their business.
Taxis are a form of public transportation. After all, what's the major difference between a taxi and a bus other than capacity/driver attention?