421–430 of 471 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technology already exists. We're there.
Because of a single experiment in highly controlled environment :) Please come back to earth.
I never left. ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's all fine when a lorry rear ends and pancakes a car because the driver fell asleep?
Nobody is saying this is logical. The point is that people will use this as a hyped-up political foothold to point out why automated drivers are "unsafe" as well as "taking our jobs".
Driver's union versus transportation industry. I have a hunch which way the politicians will sway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Public and political perception need to consider autonomous commercial trucking to be safe, rather than safer. "Safer than human drivers" all too easily becomes "we can't control when these robot trucks my crash into a mother driving her kids to school," when you put it into the political regulation arena.
> Public and political perception need to consider autonomous commercial trucking to be safe, rather than safer. No, safer than humans is the bar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And then when you get to your destination, manoeuvring a 50' trailer is no easy task, even for a trained driver like my dad. I wonder if there will be a more specialised role for human drivers here akin to pilots in ports. Companies at the scale able to invest in the tech might have the trucks arrive at a queue near regional hubs and have wet-ware do the 10 minutes of fiddly driving after clearing off the Smart car…
The article says so. The plan is to have human drivers in each city drive the "last mile" from the interstate freeway exit to the destination. The current autonomous technology is only effective on freeways, so having human drivers drop the truck off at the interstate, and pick it up again solves the temporary problem of not having 100% effective automation of city driving/trailer parking.
We already fly military aircraft remotely, I don't see why a truck that's packed with cameras and sensors can't be driven safely by a human in an office somewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody is saying this is logical. The point is that people will use this as a hyped-up political foothold to point out why automated drivers are "unsafe" as well as "taking our jobs".
Fun fact: automated elevators were considered to be "unsafe" and "taking our jobs", too. Somehow we got past that one!
Admittedly, deaths are very rare, especially per-trip, 27 per year or 0.00000015% per trip -- self driving cars should be able to get into that level of safety, current automotive fatality rates are around 1 in 100M (or .000001%/mile)
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/15/news/la-heb-elevator...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They started truck automation in mining and container terminals in ports. Areas with no other traffic and the possibility of active guidance (beacons along/embedded in the route and so on.) Highways are the next obvious use. I could see automated trucks driving down the transcanadian highway for example or similar long interstate stretch. I gotta say though, if we're going that way, why not go intermodal, add a RR ri…
Roads are really expensive. Adding rail lines is cheaper to build and operate so a dedicated automated truck lane seems like a poor idea. If anything building 100+ MPH rail for long trips like this seems like a great investment until you adjust for actual traffic levels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the last mile is where driverless trucks are most useful. For long haul, you can just use trains.
> But the last mile is where driverless trucks are most useful. For long haul, you can just use trains. And yet the highways are full of semi trailers...
In the US, especially outside of the northeast, most interstate highways are not tolled, so users of the road don't pay any more for its maintenance than non-users do. But someone is still paying for it. Taxpayers who don't use the roads are effectively subsidizing those who do.
By contrast, railways usually own their rails and are obliged to maintain them themselves, and thus have to fold those costs into the price.
This is really unfair.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cyclists tend to avoid freeways.
You can find quite a few videos on YouTube of cyclists on freeways. There is a video from a couple years ago of a bunch of cyclists holding up traffic on the freeway in Austin because they felt like riding on the highway.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was able to find this from the Congressional Budget Office > Estimates of pavement damage by trucks, the largest per-mile external cost of truck use, range from about 5 to 55 cents per mile depending on the weight of the truck, the number of axles over which its weight is distributed, and where it operates.... https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/112th-congress-2011-... The fuel tax is 30 cents/gallon of diesel,…
20 to 30% is quite a bit. And road repairs are only part of the cost subsidy to trucks. Property taxes are assessed on the tracks, but not on the highways, for another.
I'd be very glad to see truck taxes/fees adjusted to better match reality. If that means less truck and more trains, all the better. Still, it's not clear to me that trains don't also get implicit subsidies (that are just less discussed because trains don't inspire as much politics), or that the positive externalities of trucks are important, or whatever.