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Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

economist.com

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Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#441

Post by scj »

todd8 wrote: post #346
stkdump wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are places where it's cold, where it rains and snows. Like Amsterdam and Copenhagen? > The good thing about the driverless cars is that they solve the parking problems in the cities. They solve the search for parking by humans. But if you want to get the cars out of the city while they aren't used, you practically double the traffic and emissions.

No, not like Amsterdam. I love Amsterdam, but I'm so tired of it being used as an example of how we should all be on bikes. It has a very temperate climate. The weather in most of the US isn't as mild and cool as Amsterdam. There are cites in the US with great weather, for example San Diego, Santa Barbara, all of Marine and Sonoma Counties in CA have great weather (sadly it is having wild fire problems right now). I…

Another factor to remember is snowfall. Where I live, we push snow to the side on roads, but it tends to stick around and accumulate for months at a time. Adding a secondary* infrastructure around bicycles would be costly.

But the big one is that the Netherlands has about half the population of Canada in an area the size of New Brunswick. Obviously they can afford better transport infrastructure than we can.

* Where I live, bike lanes become snow banks circa mid-January.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#442

Post by OrangeMango »

zjaffee wrote: post #366
todd8 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not like Amsterdam. I love Amsterdam, but I'm so tired of it being used as an example of how we should all be on bikes. It has a very temperate climate. The weather in most of the US isn't as mild and cool as Amsterdam. There are cites in the US with great weather, for example San Diego, Santa Barbara, all of Marine and Sonoma Counties in CA have great weather (sadly it is having wild fire problems right now). I…

Minneapolis has some of the highest percentage of Bike Commuters in the US at around 3.5% only falling after Portland at ~6% and San Francisco which is a nudge closer to 4%. The entire west coast has weather at least as favorable to bike commuting as Amsterdam, yet the percentages of people commuting that way are still far lower than Amsterdam simply because the infrastructure isn't there.

People who think nothing of skiing or snowboarding in winter conditions are convinced that biking is impossible in those same conditions. It makes no sense.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#443

Post by Animats »

Self-driving got taken over by the "fake it til you make it" crowd. Uber, Cruise (go find Cruise's original demo video and marketing claims), Tesla, etc. Only Google/Waymo approached it as a hard problem, and only Waymo has something that's deployed, even in a limited way, without a "safety driver".

Somebody will probably make it work, but it may come from some boring old company like Ford or Continental or Fujitsu. A background in webcrap has negative value in this area, as it does in avionics.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#444

Post by [deleted] »

tomerico wrote: post #398
notJim wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Live in the city and want to go hiking 20 miles away? No reason trains can't solve this. When I lived in NYC there was plenty of hiking off the NJ transit. Popular hiking destinations here in the PNW have huge problems with traffic that would be helped greatly by building rail lines to them.

Why create new rail lines when driverless cars can take you anywhere?

[deleted]

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#445

Post by sliken »

davidgould wrote: post #198
sliken wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, ok, pick any luxury car priced similarly to the Tesla.

It's odd that so many of the comments on the self driving threads make this assumption that drivers of expensive cars are safer than drivers of inexpensive cars. It is just part of the classist bias that attaches virtue to wealth? Or is there some data that suggests that a Mercedes driver is a better driver than a Kia driver?

It's a combination of things. For instance drivers are statistically more likely to have accidents at 18 than 50. Drivers are more likely to have an expensive car than 50 than 18. Being less financially secure often means you are trying to keep an old junker with crappy brakes going when young.

Also risky behavior like speeding, DUI, driving aggressively, passing when unsafe, etc are generally more common when young.

Sure individuals vary, but just look at the cost of insurance to verify.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#446

Post by rtkwe »

cjrp wrote: post #301
bane wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large aircraft are basically self-driving these days. Pilots can choose to do almost nothing at all from takoff to landing. However, the failure modes are all mostly catastrophic so pilots remain under the assumption that they can slightly increase the survivability rate when the automation fails. Modern drone systems are also have elements of this kind of automation and can fly complex flight paths and station keep…

> Large aircraft are basically self-driving these days. Pilots can choose to do almost nothing at all from takoff to landing. Sort of. The plane will continue to fly the pre-programmed route without pilot involvement, so the actual manipulation of the control surfaces is no longer their primary task. But there are systems to monitor, controllers to talk to, weather systems to navigate around, climbs/descents to find…

They could automate pretty much all of those away but even if they did I don't think flying is a good comparison for self-driving. Flying is pretty much the ideal environment for computer control because there are only a few actual obstacles to deal with; weather, terrain, and other planes and all of those can be handled with outside signals.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#447

Post by rootusrootus »

Steltek wrote: post #368
rootusrootus wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large metro areas also include an incredibly large proportion of suburban homes where people absolutely continue to rely on cars.

A suburban area that likely expanded because of 1950's highways that bored through the downtowns of cities, displacing thousands. Streetcar Suburbs, predating car oriented development, are way more walkable and not car dependent.

That may be true in many cases. But I distinctly remember some of the highways that were built in Portland, and they bulldozed existing suburban neighborhoods to do it. This city was basically one big suburb well before someone had the bright idea to build I-5 through downtown. Heck, almost all of the [residential] tall buildings in the downtown area were built well after the freeway was built.

We have an urban growth boundary now which tries to limit further sprawl, but it can't change the fact that the Portland metro area is 2 million people most of whom live in single-family homes, or maybe low density suburban apartment complexes.

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#448

Post by rrix2 »

demosthenes14 wrote: post #388
cloudwalking wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to rent a car to go hiking, you aren't going to hike very often.

This isn't true, talk to folks in downtown Seattle. Anecdotally, I have a group of 5 that rents a car to go hiking about every other weekend. Splitting $70 between 5 people twice a month beats buying a car by... a lot. Know tons of others that do this.

On the subject of Seattle, there are county transit busses which go to some trailheads: https://trailheaddirect.org/

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#449

Post by samuell »

Animats wrote: post #443

Self-driving got taken over by the "fake it til you make it" crowd. Uber, Cruise (go find Cruise's original demo video and marketing claims), Tesla, etc. Only Google/Waymo approached it as a hard problem, and only Waymo has something that's deployed, even in a limited way, without a "safety driver". Somebody will probably make it work, but it may come from some boring old company like Ford or Continental or Fujitsu.…

Einride got driverless trucks running on a public road:

https://insideevs.com/news/350293/autonomous-einride-t-pod-p...

Re: Driverless cars are stuck in a jam

#450

Post by rtkwe »

rootusrootus wrote: post #349
magduf wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass transit doesn't really work in US suburbs because everything is just too spread out; it's not economical, nor logistically effective, to build subways to subdivisions. But even in built-up cities, Americans cling to their cars just like they cling to guns and religion. Look at all the uproar in Manhattan, NYC, where they're taking away street parking and putting in protected cycling lanes. People are upset at th…

Americans like cars so much because they're incredibly useful. And public transit sucks, which is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem. We don't want to invest in something which is unpleasant to use, so it remains unpleasant to use. In my city, we have the additional problem that the local transit agency only wants to spend money on light rail, which is just a smaller version of the "nobody builds subways to subdivisio…

Yeah, I always describe it as the US setup being in a relatively stable configuration currently and the mass transit solution being another very stable setup but the transition between the two being both painful, expensive, and time consuming.
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