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We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

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Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#371

Post by danny_codes »

melling wrote: post #64
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?” 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000 it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now. Let’s start by having trains take you to the…

I mean it only took China 15 years. But then again Mike Johnson is speaker so.. well, it's not going well.

IMO the main risk around self-driving cars is that it will perpetuate terrible city design. Hopefully the tide will turn towards sane urban policy soon.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#372

Post by danny_codes »

npunt wrote: post #142
verve_rat wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, trains?

Think smaller. Trains are enormous, costly, and extremely inflexible to changes in demand. Have you ever seen a train car small enough to only carry a single person? The existence of 4000lb cars and 200000lb trains is because we lacked the ability to quickly and safely move only the necessary atoms from A to B, so we had to bundle them up with a ton of other atoms until it became practical to implement. We can free o…

Eh, this is a silly take. Almost all trips are going to a few destinations. Work, Home, Shopping, Schools, etc. A sanely designed city would just build transit to those places.

Self-driving cars are solving an unnecessary problem, if that makes sense. US made some truly terrible design decisions, and self-driving is sort-of doubling down on the disaster.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#373

Post by danny_codes »

flatline wrote: post #37
polalavik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead. Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.

What do you mean? Cars are a marvelous solution to traveling a medium distance rapidly. They are ubiquitous as a result. I doubt we will ever have effective public transit across the US. It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective. And the price of convenience would be high. I used to be bullish about autonomous driving but no longer am. Ten years ago it felt like a m…

> It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective.

I hear this all the time and it still makes no sense at all. Population goes where transit allows population to go. Cars resulted in low population density. By getting rid of cars, you get rid of low population density.

As for cost, there is no world in which every person owning an automobile is cheaper than public transit. It's not remotely close. Average cost of private car ownership in the US exceeds 10k a year. That's about 3.4T of private spending, or 14% of GDP. This does not include the cost of roads. A single year of private automobile spending would build 20k miles of high speed rail, even assuming costs were CA HSR high.

I feel like the "low pop density & too big" argument is one of those things that only makes sense if you never consider second-order effects.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#374

Post by danny_codes »

xnx wrote: post #146
tayo42 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should frame public transportation as a defense issue and use that obscene budget to fund and subsidize it

I don't think I follow. Rail lines are fixed targets and extremely vulnerable to attack. Cars can route around damaged roads and even drive off-road in some cases.

He's not saying it's actually for defense. He's saying we _say_ it is, and then magically there will be funding for it.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#375

Post by danny_codes »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #67
mathieuh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not the only one. It seems to me we should be trying to get rid of cars in favour of mass transport or two-wheel personal transport. Having personal transport in the form of cars makes little sense in cities where space is at a premium. Where I live, to get across the city on public transport takes 40 minutes and a bus change. I can cycle it in 20. Replacing human-driven cars with driverless cars is going to m…

The limiting factor for increasing bus frequency and adding new routes is the lack of operators. Having self-driving buses will obviously help in cities. And given the higher momentum, the margin for error is lower for self-driving buses and it's better to start with cars.

The limiting factor is money. Plenty of people are down to drive buses. But if you think about it a bus is just a gimped version of a light rail / subway. It holds less people, is less comfortable, more expensive to maintain and operate, and being a bus gives it no benefit at all over rail. The only reason buses exist is because we made some terrible design mistakes with cars.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#376

Post by danny_codes »

xnx wrote: post #149
dmix wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have to have this conversation in every single thread that mentions driverless cars? We get it, an extremely vocal subset of reddit/HN who lives` in downtown cities likes public transit more than cars.

It's a technically impressive technology that's right at a key inflection point with potentially huge ramifications to how 15% of the economy is structured. I think I'm an outlier because I like trains, bikes, and cars, but you have to pick the right tool for the job. In the US, new train lines are almost never the right tool.

Or rather, it is the right tool, but the constituents are so uneducated about urbanism that they flatly reject it. Kind of an interesting dynamic when you think about it.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#377

Post by danny_codes »

TheDong wrote: post #108
kdmccormick wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transit can be solved in the US. Plenty of other countries have done it. That's why it's so exhausting that so many of our brightest minds AND the public's imagination of the future are dedicated to turning our unsustainably-car-centric cities into possibly-safer-but-still-unsustainably-car-centric cities instead of, you know, modern cities with good transit.

the fact that it's solved outside of the US is irrelevant here. the American Dream requires that each successful American owns a Car (and House, which is another reason American Cities can't be like other country's cities). they don't have to drive it, but since you have to own one, you might as well drive it, right? places like the uk, germany, china, japan, etc all have working public transit, but they don't have t…

I appreciate the sarcasm! I agree though that there are a lot of crazy car-brains in the US. But I think the tide is shifting. Cities are pushing back against car infestation. If cities can get enough political will to de-car themselves, then inter-city transit will come back too.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#378

Post by huytersd »

Mawr wrote: post #363
nradov wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have time to go shopping so frequently.

You wouldn't "go shopping", you'd just stop by the grocery store that's along the sidewalk/cycle path to your workplace.

No thanks, I like a fully stocked pantry and buying things in massive bulk from Costco so I can get high quality products for a reasonable price.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#379

Post by danny_codes »

decafninja wrote: post #297
TheDong wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like such a bizarre jump to say "if we build trains, simply riding the train will drive people to drugs and mass murder, causing a new problem outweighing the benefits of the train". If the train is not what is driving people to these heinous conditions, then it seems like this imagined problem is some unrelated thing. Should we not build any shopping malls or parks or roads until we can somehow be certain t…

You're reading it wrong. Of course riding the train won't drive people to drugs or mass murder. Rather, drugs and the perceived threat of violent crime, as well as general unpleasantness, is what turns off people from embracing public transit. Build a brand new shiny transit system in the USA, and you'll still face the same problems without changing the culture or enforcement. Both will face massive public backslash…

> without changing the culture or enforcement

Fortunately, it is within our power to both change the culture and enforce it.

Thought TBF the underlying reason is that America has a relatively abysmal safety net (healthcare being the most terrible of the lot), so you just have more people falling through the cracks onto the street.

Re: We have decided to pause driverless operations across all of our fleets

#380

Post by spaceguillotine »

yoshamano wrote: post #284
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Seattle, you can beat a driver to the airport using the train…unless you live in Ballard, or any other place not on the I5 corridor. I never bothered with taking the train to the Beijing airport either, even though it existed for much of time there. Taxi was still more convenient. If we are talking Tokyo or Paris, ok, no problem, but it doesn’t make sense in a lot of cities for a lot of connections to be made.

Whenever I visit Seattle I always take the light rail into the city. The few times I've had a chance to bring this up in conversation with a local they've always been surprised that someone actually uses the light rail to get to or from the airport.

this is exclusively how i pick people up from the airport now, tell them to take the link to northgate then i'll drive to get them from there, so much easier. I love the link but the home to link station bus rides are the slowest part of the journey, i've waited for the rapid ride buses for an hour before.
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