271–280 of 435 posts
The issue with braking distance and jackknifing could be resolved with smaller trucks. The 18 wheeler we know is optimal because it maximize the cubic volume driven by one person. If you don't need the human driver, two smaller trucks might be better than one.
I didn't expect fully autonomous trucking to be here yet. What I did expect, however, is semi-autonomous many-trailer trucks/convoys, because it's a much simpler technical problem that still offers enormous efficiency gains. Let's get a little bit crazy and imagine something very different from what we have today, but still only requiring a single driver. One truck cab at the front. Individual trailers have their own…
I just don’t see a 12 trailer 140m long road train with wires strung between the bits being feasible in any way on a road that has other, untrained users on it.
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Yeah that would be ideal. Sadly a lot of stuff goes wrong in building rail because governments have to do it and clearly suck at it, and if it weren't so, there wouldn't be nearly as many trucks on the road. Unlike building rail, the concept I outlined would be feasible to do for a private corporation though, even a startup. The delta in necessary resources between the two is huge. I'm also not quite convinced that y…
Fortunately not all governments are terrible at rail infra planning/upkeep. Perhaps autonomous trucks as you outline could do the last X miles from the point the train offloads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
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No. Trains are great for what they do, but roads go more places.
Do roads have to go more places? Are they dramatically cheaper and easier to make and cheaper to maintain than train tracks? Or do we just already have a bunch of them? Mind you I'm not taking about last-mile dirt road up a mountain to one family, but the massive arteries with enormous throughput that constitute the vast majority of lbs/mile of shipping.
I'm wondering why there is so little talk about changing road infrastructure to make self-driving easier to pull off. E.g. dedicated lanes for self driving or hand-off stations where human drivers can take over etc etc. Amid the massive potential upsides, any reasonable government would invest in measures that turn out to effectivley improve self-drivability of the respective national grid.
> No guarantee of a timely response from remote operators or backend services. > Therefore, all safety-critical decisions must be made by the onboard computer alone. Why is the requirement that all safety-critical decisions must be made on board, versus the seemingly-simplifying assumption that only some or most decisions would have to be made on board, because a remote operator or backend service could be available…
If the AV ran into an issue, it could tele-help and have a human operator take over.
Completely makes sense that you could have a person monitoring multiple AV trucks and take over driving when needed.
Build more railroads. (I used to work for an autonomous truck company, and when you factor in the cost of roads in addition to the development of the trucks, it makes absolutely no sense to do autonomous trucking when you could do trains. As a culture, we've been brainwashed not to fund trains. We collectively spend billions and billions on roads but would not dare spend money to build more tracks. It is shocking and…
I think the problem few people talk about is the small, in-city rail lines that used to exist that don't anymore. 100 years ago the city I live in had dedicated rail lines going to every major factory in the city - there was little need for last-mile trucking. AFAIK there are no western cities that are organized like this anymore, so the best you can do is deliver goods to a rail station and truck it from there - thi…
What I did not appreciate, but they did, is that these rails can bring an absolutely astonishing amount of noise into a town, and behind that a long trail of associated social ills. There is a gradual sifting of residents within a certain distance of these trains, based on who is either loud themselves and thus doesn't mind, or else must tolerate the amount of noise these things make.
Our town is old enough that some of the 'nicer' neighborhoods predate the introduction of the rails, so there isn't a strong confounding signal of 'bad' neighborhood correlation at work here. In at least one case there was a house we pushed past our agent's scheduling machinations to see for ourselves, and would likely have closed on had we not happened to visit at just the right time, when a multi-engined repositioning train (which we had no idea was a very common guest on what we thought was a mild mannered commuter rail line) came through. Though unseen and multiple blocks away, it still shook the floorboards as it passed.
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Do roads have to go more places? Are they dramatically cheaper and easier to make and cheaper to maintain than train tracks? Or do we just already have a bunch of them? Mind you I'm not taking about last-mile dirt road up a mountain to one family, but the massive arteries with enormous throughput that constitute the vast majority of lbs/mile of shipping.
Railroads have much much stricter requirements with respect to maximum allowed curvature and slope. So yes roads can go far more places than rails can.
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I think the problem few people talk about is the small, in-city rail lines that used to exist that don't anymore. 100 years ago the city I live in had dedicated rail lines going to every major factory in the city - there was little need for last-mile trucking. AFAIK there are no western cities that are organized like this anymore, so the best you can do is deliver goods to a rail station and truck it from there - thi…
I live in a city that has some of these going through it, and I can say that my opinions changed dramatically after moving here, with respect to this idea. Our real estate agent, in hindsight, had employed numerous subtle tactics to discourage us from taking serious interest in homes that were within a quarter mile or so of these lines, although I was completely oblivious to what they were doing at the time. What I d…
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Hm. I did a quick search on freight percentages, EU vs US and google gave me this snippet off the top hit. "46 percent of European freight goes by truck while only 11 percent goes by rail, while in the United States more than 40 percent goes by rail while just 30 percent goes on the highway." Seems US is doing pretty well on prioritising freight rail transport, despite brainwashing, at least compared to europe. Which…
That's 40% of "ton-miles" - trains disproportionately move heavy, cheap goods (i.e. aggregate, coal), which makes that number potentially misleading. The percentage of freight moved by rail by "value" is closer to 15% (trucking is ~65%). https://www.bts.gov/newsroom/2017-north-american-freight-num... https://www.aar.org/facts-figures#:~:text=Freight%20rail%20a... .