221–230 of 288 posts
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I’d like to see AVs compared to the average good driver. I’d bet it’s a lot closer in that case.
I'm not bullish on self driving cars, but that's a bit unfair. If their car performs better than 50% of the population, then that sounds like a success.
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There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically. How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved. The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollu…
Dozens of billions are being poured in. That’s we got the California high speed rail connecting nowhere to nothing and BART just barely making it to San Jose. None of that still fixes the last mile problem of suburbia, and buses aren’t a solution. They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.
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There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically. How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved. The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollu…
Dozens of billions are being poured in. That’s we got the California high speed rail connecting nowhere to nothing and BART just barely making it to San Jose. None of that still fixes the last mile problem of suburbia, and buses aren’t a solution. They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.
Uh, make them more frequent, more comfortable and faster?
I spend the last 15 minutes of my commute on a bus. Driving vs. bus + train = 3 minutes. I can drive, probably get stuck in traffic, get pissed at angry drivers ... or just chill on a bus and train for 45 minutes.
The only time it is worth driving is when I need to-the-minute exactness of when to arrive, which is rarely ever. IOW, I show up 10 minutes early to work (and also leave 10 minutes early) to be on the public transportation schedule.
Trains come every 10 minutes, busses every 15. I've never had any issues. Sure, I walk a whole 300 meters (1000ft) from the bus to my house, and again from the bus to work. But that is probably good for me since I don't get enough exercise as it is.
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…
The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me. 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, i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically. How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved. The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollu…
Public transport infrastructure at a national scale is not a dozens of billions project, it's a hundreds to thousands of billions project. The current investment in Waymo is less than the investment in the (still underfunded) NYC metro alone
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The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me. 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, i…
There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically. How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved. The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollu…
The reason why China and other Asian nations have amazing public transit isn’t financial or technical. It’s cultural and social. And by that, I don’t mean anything to do with cars - I’m referring to just a public willingness (or enforcement) to enshre nice public things stay nice, which is often lacking in the US.
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U.S cities were rebuilt to accommodate cars, and there's no reason they can't be rebuilt to undo this damage.
USA has trouble building enough houses as it is, or a single bridge or piece of infrastructure, and you say they can simply rebuild entire cities?
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How many years to implement self driving cars? But really I think they’re the future of the city.
That's because it's a hard problem, not because of local government.
A perfect "this is why we can't have nice things."
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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.